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THE    BEGINNINGS    OF  LIBRARIES 


A  Collection  of  Quipus 

American  Museum  of  Natural  History,  N.  Y. 

Nos.  B  3453,  8704 


THE 

Beginnings  of  Libraries 


BT 

Ernest  Cushing  Richardson 


ARCHON  BOOKS 

HAMDEN,  CONNECTICUT 

LONDON 

1963 


Copyright,  1914,  by 
Ernest  Gushing  Richardson 

Originally  published  by  Princeton  University  Press 

Reprinted  1963  with  permission  in  an  unaltered 

and  unabridged  edition. 

Library  of  Congress  Catalog  Card  Number:  63-16038 
Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


College 
Library 


PREFACE 


A  considerable  mass  of  memoranda 
on  the  early  history  of  libraries  has  been 
gathered  by  the  author  of  this  essay  dur- 
ing the  last  twenty-five  years,  and  out  of 
this  material  various  essays  have  been 
published  from  time  to  time  on  Antedilu- 
vian Libraries,  Medieval  Libraries,  Some 
Old  Egyptian  Librarians,  etc.  The  fact 
that  the  unworked  mass  of  modern  infor- 
mation through  excavations  is  so  great 
as  to  put  off  for  a  long  time  still  a  syste- 
matic treatise,  has  led  to  the  plan  of  pub- 
lishing these  essays  and  addresses  from 
time  to  time  as  completed  and  in  uniform 
style.  Although  written  for  very  differ- 
ent audiences  and  in  various  methods,  each 
is  an  attempt  to  gather  information  not 
generally  accessible  and  to  be,  so  far  as  it 
goes,  either  a  contribution  to  knowledge 
or  to  the  method  of  knowledge,  a  sort  of 
preliminary  report  or  investigation  in  the 

[v] 


1229568 


field,  pending  full  and  systematic  report. 
The  nucleus  of  this  essay  on  the  Begin- 
nings of  Libraries  was  an  address  to  the 
Library  School  of  the  New  York  Public 
Library  at  the  beginning  of  the  academic 
year  1912-13,  and  takes  its  color  from  this 
fact,  but  it  has  been  freely  enlarged. 
The  writer  owes  special  thanks  to  the 
American  Museum  of  Natural  History  in 
New  York. 

Ernest  Gushing  Richardson. 
Princeton  University  Library, 
October  12,  191 3. 


[vi] 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

1.  A  collection  of  quipus.    Frontispiece. 

2.  A  collection  of  message  sticks. .     94 

3.  A  collection  of  wampum 98 

4.  A  record  ornament  of  leopard 

teeth    102 

5.  Tupai  Cupa's  Tattoo  Marks...    106 

6.  Picture    writing,    Lone     Dog's 

Winter  Count   108 


[ix] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

§   I.  Introduction 

This  talk  is  addressed  to  those  begin- 
ning library  work  as  a  life  work.  This 
connects  "library  work"  with  two  signifi- 
cant phrases,  "those  beginning"  and  "as 
a  life  work". 

This  phrase  "as  a  life  work"  suggests 
what  is  perhaps  the  chief  value  of  a  li- 
brary school  training.  The  distinction  of 
and  main  justification  for  all  kinds  of 
higher  education  is  that  such  education 
aims  to  put  the  student  in  position  to 
view  his  work  to  be  done  as  a  whole,  and 
life  as  a  thing  to  be  wrought  out  as  a 
whole,  not  to  be  lived  from  hand  to 
mouth.  Presence  at  a  library  school 
means  that  the  student  has  had  foresight 

[I] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

enough  to  be  willing  to  spend  energy, 
money,  and  a  good  bit  of  that  most 
precious  capital  time,  in  sitting  down  to 
draw  plans  for  his  life  building  as  a  whole 
instead  of  starting  in  to  build  by  rule  of 
thumb. 

There  are  however  in  this  matter  two 
factors — one's  self  and  the  library.  In 
order  to  sketch  out  one's  life  work  as 
librarian  and  live  it,  one  must  needs  first 
know  what  libraries  are,  what  they  are 
capable  of  becoming  and  how  one  can 
best  apply  such  knowledge  and  energy  as 
one  may  have  to  making  these  libraries 
accomplish  what  they  were  intended  to 
do  for  human  society.  This  involves 
looking  at  libraries  as  a  whole  as  well  as 
at  one's  life  work  as  a  whole,  and  the  task 
of  the  library  school  is  to  give  this  view 
of  the  situation.  In  the  last  analysis  this 
is  the  most  important  thing  which  any 
technical  school  does  for  one,  this  giving 
the  vision  of  the  whole  of  experience  in 

[2] 


INTRODUCTION 

one's  chosen  field  in  order  that  one  may 
draw  his  Hfe  plan  in  view  of  it.  And  for 
that  matter,  the  task  of  technical  educa- 
tion does  not  differ  in  this  regard  from 
the  task  of  general  education,  which  is 
simply  the  vision  of  the  whole  of  human 
experience,  as  a  whole,  with  reference  to 
one's  own  life  among  all  kinds  and 
conditions  of  men. 

As  therefore  the  field  of  science  and 
general  activities  is  the  Universe,  so  the 
field  of  library  science  and  education  is  li- 
braries— ^libraries  top  and  bottom,  inside 
and  out,  beginning,  middle  and  end  and 
looked  on  as  a  whole. 

On  the  other  hand  the  phrase  "those 
beginning"  suggests  the  facts  that  you  are 
yourselves  at  the  beginning  of  a  course 
of  study,  that  the  school  year  is  at  its 
beginning,  that  this  New  York  Public  Li- 
brary school  itself  is  still  in  its  beginning^ 
and  that  library  schools  in  general  arc 
only  in  their  beginnings.     This  in  turn 

[3] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

suggests  as  the  topic  of  this  talk  three  as- 
pects of  the  matter  of  library  beginnings : 
the  beginnings  of  libraries  themselves,  the 
beginnings  of  library  science  and  the  be- 
ginnings of  schools  for  library  science. 
This  talk  will  touch  briefly,  towards  the 
end,  on  the  two  latter  topics,  but  will  have 
chiefly  to  do  with  the  beginnings  of 
libraries. 


[4] 


§  2.  The  stttdy  of  beginnings 

At  the  outset  it  should  be  said  that  the 
importance  of  this  study  of  beginnings  is 
in  every  science  quite  out  of  proportion 
to  the  importance  of  the  objects  studied. 
Beginnings  are  by  nature  small.  The 
highest  and  best  things  are  by  nature  the 
most  complex  and  latest,  but  the  study  of 
the  earliest  and  simplest  libraries,  like  the 
study  of  the  simplest  cell  life,  is  not  only 
useful  from  several  points  of  view  but 
vital  to  a  right  understanding  of  the  more 
complex.  The  great  vice  of  t«:hnical 
education  of  all  sorts  is  its  tendency  to 
fix  attention  on  the  latest  and  best  only. 
It  is  true  of  course  that  man's  ideas  and 
methods  are  an  evolution — ^just  as  his 
body  is.  The  fact  of  the  accumulation  of 
human  experience  is  the  central  significant 

[5] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

fact  of  human  civilization.  It  is  the  glory 
of  libraries  that  by  reason  of  this  fact 
they  are  an  indispensable  tool  of  progress 
in  civilization.  On  the  whole,  by  and 
large,  the  latest  ideas  are  in  fact  best,  for 
they  tend  to  sum  up  in  themselves  the  total 
of  the  useful  variations  of  all  preceding 
ideas,  and  the  main  time  and  attention 
of  a  course  of  education  must  of  necessity 
therefore  be  given  to  the  latest  and  best 
experience,  because  it  does  sum  up  all  that 
has  gone  before.  This  does  not,  however, 
lessen  the  value  of  the  study  of  earlier 
ideas  on  any  subject  back  to  the  very  be- 
ginnings, for  at  any  given  time  and  place, 
the  latest  idea  or  method  in  any  field  is 
not  necessarily  the  best.  It  might  be  the 
best:  it  is  in  position  to  build  on  all  pre- 
vious experience  and  so  become  best.  We 
all  know,  however,  that  the  latest  book  on 
a  subject  is  not  always  the  best  book.  So 
it  is,  too,  of  individual  ideas  or  methods. 
This  frequent  failure  of  the  latest  to 

[6] 


THE  STUDY  OF  BEGINNINGS 

be  best  comes  chiefly  from  lack  of  knowl- 
edge of  previous  experience.  Every  year 
sees  library  methods  put  in  operation 
which  were  tried  and  found  wholly  want- 
ing in  the  last  century  or  it  may  be,  two, 
three  or  even  five  thousand  years  ago. 
On  the  other  hand  again,  every  now  and 
then  we  find  that  some  method  or  idea, 
discovered  long  ago  but  neglected  mean- 
time, is  far  better  than  those  in  common 
use.  This  has  often  been  true  of  great 
scientific  ideas  and  we  have  in  Mendelism 
a  striking  recent  example.  One  must 
needs  therefore  study  earlier  ideas  in  any 
field,  both  in  order  to  be  sure  that  so- 
called  new  ideas  are  not  exploded  old  ones 
and  in  order  to  find  whether  common 
practice  in  any  field  at  a  given  time  is  not 
really  the  development  of  an  inferior  line 
of  evolution. 

And,  again,  from  the  point  of  view  of 
science,  this  study  of  earlier  stages  is  use- 
ful because  the  simple  things  are  often  the 

[7] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

best  interpreters  of  more  complex,  the 
early  of  the  late,  and  it  is  the  vision  of 
the  whole  in  perspective  to  the  very  be- 
ginning which  gives  the  clue  to  the  real 
meaning  of  the  latest.  "Students  have 
come  to  realize,"  says  Professor  Stewart 
Paton  (in  the  Popular  Science  Magazine 
8,1912,166),  "that  in  the  .  .  .  amoeba, 
jelly-fish,  crab  or  fish,  is  to  be  found  the 
key  that  will  eventually  open  the  book 
.  .  .  (of)  the  most  complex  psychic 
manifestations."  This  is  true  also  of  li- 
braries— the  oldest,  smallest  and  rudest 
g^ve  a  clue  to  the  more  complex,  and  it 
may  be  added,  parenthetically,  the  library 
is  itself  in  fact  the  most  complex  psychic 
manifestation  in  the  objective  Universe. 

Beginnings  thus,  though  small,  are  the 
roots  of  the  matter.  This  is  so  well  rec- 
ognized iit  the  field  of  science  as  to  have 
become  an  axiom,  and  in  the  study  of 
any  class  of  things  nowadays  the  aim  is 
to  trace  each  kind  of  thing — plant,  ani- 
[8] 


THE  STUDY  OF  BEGINNINGS 

mal,  idea  or  social  institution  back  to  its 
beginning.  Evolution  has  taught  us  to 
expect  a  genealogical  series  back  and  back 
to  very  simple  forms  and  the  method  of 
all  science  has  become  what  is  called  his- 
torical or  genetic.  Natural  science  is  not 
satisfied  until  the  most  complex  animals 
and  plants  have  been  traced  back  through 
all  their  complexities  to  single  cell  origins, 
and,  if  Browning  may  be  believed,  the 
aim  of  humane  and  ethical  science  too 
does  not  rest  short  of  the  same  effort  "to 
trace  love's  faint  beginnings  in  mankind" 
This  study  of  the  beginnings  is,  more- 
over, not  only  at  the  bottom  of  the  method 
of  modern  science  but  of  the  method  of 
modern  teaching.  Every  man,  it  is  said, 
in  his  life  history  retraces  the  history  of 
his  race,  and  the  race  history  of  man  is 
above  all  things  a  history  of  developing 
ideas.  This  has  two  aspects  significant 
for  the  method  of  teaching.  As  investi- 
gating science  must  trace  every  complex 

[9l 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

idea  back  to  its  simplest  beginnings,  so 
teaching  traces  the  idea  forward  from 
those  beginnings  to  its  latest  form.  The 
law  by  which  man  in  his  individual  de- 
velopment of  ideas  must  retrace  the  his- 
tory of  the  race  applies  to  every  idea  or 
group  of  ideas  and  it  is  doubtful  therefore 
if  any  one  ever  learns  anything  rightly  in 
life  unless  he  patiently  follows  the  idea  of 
it  from  its  simplest  beginnings  to  its  latest 
form — the  path  being  sometimes  a  steady 
growth  in  value,  sometimes  a  rise  and  fall 
again  towards  extinction.  The  historical 
method  of  teaching,  therefore,  is  the  only 
method  which  can  be  called  natural. 

The  other  teaching  aspect  of  this  mat- 
ter is  the  very  significant  fact  in  child 
psychology  that  the  general  development 
of  the  child's  mind,  like  the  development 
of  its  body,  does  in  fact  repeat  the  history 
of  its  ancestors  as  they  passed  from  ges- 
tures and  cries  to  articulate  speech  and 
writing  and  through  these  from  the  sim- 

[lO] 


THE  STUDY  OF  BEGINNINGS 

plest  knowledge  to  the  most  complex.  The 
child  must  therefore,  in  short,  be  taken 
along  "the  paths  upon  which  in  a  very 
real  sense  every  human  being  has  come  in 
person"  and  the  natural  method  of  child 
teaching  must  consequently  be  deduced 
particularly  from  a  study  of  the  begin- 
nings of  speech  and  writing,  books  and 
book  collections.  In  a  sense,  and  in  a 
very  real  sense,  the  key  to  the  scientific 
pedagogy  of  the  future  lies  in  the  group 
of  studies  summed  up  as  library  science, 
for  the  library  is  the  late  and  complex 
object  which  sums  up  in  itself  the  sciences 
of  the  book,  the  word,  and  all  simpler  ele- 
ments of  human  expression  and  record, 
if  there  be  any  such.  A  fourth  reason  for 
the  study  of  beginnings  is,  therefore,  that 
it  is  the  natural  method  of  study  and 
teaching. 

Finally  and  closely  connected  with  the 
preceding  reasons  is  the  fact  that  the  pur- 
pose of  all  science  is  prophecy.    We  learn 

[III 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

not  so  much  that  we  may  teach,  as  the 
motto  says,  but  we  learn  that  we  may 
foretell.  The  object  of  all  science  is  to 
understand  from  what  has  been  the  rela- 
tion of  cause  and  effect  in  the  past,  what 
is  likely  to  be  the  result  of  any  given  set 
of  circumstances  in  the  future.  Physics, 
e.g.  has  proved  a  very  sure  prophetic 
guide.  An  engineer  can  tell  with  preci- 
sion that  a  bridge  constructed  in  a  certain 
way  will  break  if  loaded  beyond  a  certain 
point.  Load  it  to  that  point  and  his 
prophecy  becomes  true.  In  the  same  way, 
with  somewhat  less  precision  perhaps,  the 
biologist  can  prophesy  results  in  the 
breeding  of  plants  and  animals,  the  physi- 
cian can  prophesy  that  quinine  will  help 
malaria,  the  farmer  that  planted  seed  un- 
der certain  conditions  will  or  will  not  on 
the  average  produce  certain  results,  and 
so  on  through  every  branch  of  human  ac- 
tivity. We  study  in  order  that  we  may 
know     the    conditions     which     will     be 

I  12] 


THE  STUDY  OF  BEGINNINGS 

brought  about  in  the  future  by  one  or 
another  set  of  circumstances  and  so  that 
we  may  be  able  to  produce  the  circum- 
stances if  we  wish  the  result.  The  prep- 
aration for  foretelling  may,  therefore,  be 
labeled  the  fifth  reason  for  historical 
study. 


[13] 


§  3-  Definition  of  the  Library 

In  approaching  the  actual  study  of 
primitive  libraries^t  is  necessary  to  touch 
a  little  on  definition  and  method.  Both 
these  matters,  essential  to  the  approach 
of  any  topic  scientifically,  doubly  need 
some  attention  at  this  point,  because  li- 
brary history  has  heretofore  not  troubled 
itself  much  about  primitive  libraries  at  all 
or  indeed  about  libraries  for  the  first  two 
thousand  years  after  they  had  left  their 
more  primitive  stages.  The  very  method, 
therefore,  lies  chiefly  outside  the  exper- 
ience of  library  history,  being  gathered 
mainly  from  primitive  art  and  anthro- 
pology, and  definition  must  needs  consider 
what  the  essential  nature  of  these  primi- 
tive libraries  is  that  links  them  with  the 
great  libraries  of  modern  times.     Discus- 

[14] 


DEFINITION 

sion  of  definition  is  the  more  necessary  in 
that  the  already  contradictory  usage  has 
been  still  farther  confused  in  the  matter 
of  the  earlier  historical  libraries  by  those 
who,  wishing  to  distinguish  the  collection 
of  purely  business  records,  public  or  pri- 
vate, from  the  collection  of  purely  literary 
works  by  calling  the  former  an  archive, 
have  yet  applied  the  term  archive,  incor- 
rectly, under  their  own  definition,  to 
mixed  collections  of  business  and  other 
records. 

Many  answers  have  been  given  to  this 
question:  What  is  a  library?  All  of 
these  imply  a  book  or  books,  a  place  of 
keeping  and  somebody  to  do  the  keep- 
ing— books,  building  and  librarian — ^but 
some  definitions  emphasize  the  books, 
some  the  place  and  some  the  keeping.  Far 
the  commonest  words  used  have  been  the 
Greek  bibliotheke  and  the  Latin  libraria 
and  their  derivatives.  The  one  rather 
emphasizes  the  place  and  the  other  the 

[15] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

books  but  both  were  used  sometimes  for 
both  Hbrary  and  bookshop.  When  mod- 
em languages  succeeded  to  the  Latin  the 
Romance  languages  kept  bibliotheca  for 
library  and  libraria  for  bookshop.  Ger- 
manic languages  on  the  other  hand  kept 
both  words  for  library,  although  in  the 
course  of  time  German  has  nearly  dropped 
librerei  for  bibliothek,  and  English  has 
quite  deserted  bibliotheke  for  library. 
Both  English  and  German  call  "book 
shop",  or  "book  business",  what  French, 
Italian  and  Spanish  call  "library". 

Library  is  thus  the  common  modern 
word  in  English  for  a  certain  something 
which  the  German  calls  Bibliothek,  the 
Frenchman  bibliotheque  and  the  Italian, 
Spaniard,  Scandinavian  and  Slav  call  by 
some  similar  name.  This  something  in 
its  last  analysis  is  a  book  or  books  kept 
for  use  rather  than  kept  for  sale  or  for 
the  paper  mill.  A  library  is  thus  a  book 
or  books  kept  for  use. 
[i6] 


DEFINITION 

Among  the  many  definitions  of  the  li- 
brary which  do  not  recognize  use  as  the 
library's  chief  distinction,  the  commonest 
are  perhaps  those  which  adopt  plurality  or 
collection  as  the  distinguishing  factor. 
Many  however  adopt  the  building  as  chief 
factor.  Typically,  of  course,  the  modem 
library  does  include  many  books,  a  whole 
separate  building  and  a  librarian,  but  even 
if  the  books  are  few,  the  place  only  a 
room,  a  chest,  a  bookcase,  or  a  single 
shelf,  and  even  if  it  is  only  the  owner 
who  is  at  the  same  time  the  keeper,  it  is 
still  recognized  to  be  a  library  if  the 
books  are  kept  for  use  and  not  for  sale. 
Quantity  does  not  matter :  the  point  which 
divides  is  the  matter  of  use  or  sale.  Even 
a  one  book  library  is,  in  fact,  a  library 
just  as  much  as  a  one  cell  plant  is  plant 
or  a  one  cell  animal  is  animal.  A  one 
book  library  is  a  very  insignificant  affair 
compared  with  the  New  York  Public  Li- 
brary  with   its   many   books   and   many 

[17] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

branches,  but  it  is  just  as  truly  a  library — 
or  else  you  must  find  some  other  word. 
In  point  of  fact  "library"  in  English,  or 
some  derivative  of  bibliotheca  in  most 
other  languages,  is  the  word  which  in 
practice  stands  to  the  book-for-use  as  the 
word  animal  or  plant  does  in  biology  for 
the  living  thing  whether  it  is  a  single  cell 
or  a  cell  complex. 

Some  definitions  again  try  to  limit  the 
library  to  printed  books  or  bound  books 
or  literary  works  as  distinguished  from 
official  or  business  documents,  and  these 
definitions  have,  as  before  said,  some- 
times led  to  a  good  deal  of  misunder- 
standing. Even  if  "archive"  is  assumed 
to  be  the  right  name  for  a  collection  of 
business  documents,  still  such  a  collection 
is  simply  one  kind  of  a  library.  Every 
one  recognizes  this  when  the  collection  of 
business  documents  is  one  of  printed  and 
bound  public  documents  (U.  S.  public 
documents  e.g.),  and  if  the  documents 
[i8] 


DEFINITION 

are  tablets,  rolls  or  folded  documents,  the 
case  does  not  differ.  If  books  are  kept 
for  use  it  makes  no  difference  whether 
they  are  of  wood,  stone,  metal,  clay,  vel- 
lum, or  paper,  whether  they  are  folded 
documents,  rolls  or  codexes,  whether  they 
are  literary  works,  government  or  busi- 
ness documents :  if  intended  for  use  they 
form  a  something  for  which  some  word 
must  be  found  which  will  apply  equally  to 
all  kinds  of  records  for  use  and  to  a 
one-book-for-use  library  as  well  as  to  thfe 
New  York  Public  Library,  The  right 
word  in  the  English  language  seems  to  be 
this  word  "library".  The  "business 
documents"  in  active  current  use  in  the 
registry  or  the  counting  house  are  per- 
haps the  farthest  away  from  the  "library" 
of  common  speech  but  they  are  equally 
far  from  "archives"  in  the  scientific  sense, 
and  curiously  thes^  have  retained  one  of 
the  very  simplest  and  oldest  names  of  the 
true  library,  "the  books",  and  of  librarian- 
ship  "book  keeping". 
[19] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

But  the  definition  of  a  library  as  a  book 
or  books  kept  for  use  only  brings  us  up 
against  the  farther  question,  What  is  a 
book?  To  this  it  may  be  answered  that 
a  book  is  any  record  of  thought  in  words. 
Here  again  neither  size,  form,  nor  mate- 
rial matters ;  even  a  one  word  record  may 
be  a  book  and  that  book  a  library.  This 
leads  again  however  to  still  another  ques- 
tion :  What  is  a  word  ?  Without  stopping 
to  elaborate  or  to  discuss  definitions  in 
detail,  we  may  take  the  next  step  and 
define  a  word  as  "any  sign  for  any 
thing",  and  again  explain  the  sign  as  any- 
thing which  points  to  something  other 
than  itself.  This  is  not  an  arbitrary  defi- 
nition but  one  founded  in  modern  psy- 
chology and  philology  and  to  be  found  in 
sundry  stout  volumes  by  Marty,  Leroy, 
Wundt,  Dittrich,  van  Ginneken,  Gabelentz, 
and  others.  The  sign  may  be  a  sound,  a 
color,  a  gesture,  a  mark  or  an  object.  In 
some  stenographic  systems  a  single  dot 
stands  for  a  whole  word. 

[20] 


DEFINITION 

The  most  insignificant  object,  there- 
fore, kept  to  suggest  something  not  itself 
may  be  a  library.  A  single  word  book  is 
of  course  a  very  insignificailt  book  indeed, 
and  the  single  letter,  single  word,  single 
book  library  a  still  more  insignificant  li- 
brary, but,  unless  you  invent  other  words 
for  them,  they  are  truly  book  and  library, 
and  there  is  no  more  reason  to  invent  an- 
other word  for  book  or  library  in  this 
case,  than  another  word  for  animal  when 
it  is  intended  to  include  both  the  amoeba 
and  man.  The  Very  simplest  library  con- 
sists therefore  of  a  single  recorded  sign 
kept  for  use.  It  is  the  feeble  faint  be- 
ginning of  a  library  but  just  as  much  a 
library  as  the  New  York  Public  Library, 
the  Library  of  Congress,  the  British  Mu- 
seum, or  the  Bibliotheque  Nationale — and 
the  beginning  of  library  wisdom  is  to  seek 
out  diligently  the  nature  of  these  rudimen- 
tary libraries. 

[21] 


§  4-  Method 

So  far  for  definition.  Now  a  word  or 
two  as  to  method.  In  this  search  for  the 
earliest  history  of  the  making  and  keep- 
ing of  records,  library  science,  like  all 
the  human  sciences,  has  at  least  three 
ways  of  approach  or  sources.  The  first 
source  is  history.  This  includes  the  evi- 
dence from  written  documents  (which  is 
direct  and  is  history  proper)  and  the  evi- 
dence from  monuments  (which  is  circum- 
stantial and  is  archaeology  proper). 

The  second  source  is  the  custom  of 
primitive  or  uncivilized  nations  of  recent 
times:  this  is  comparative  library  science. 
The  modern  idea  of  evolution  implies  that 
these  primitive  peoples  are  simply  cases  of 
arrested  or  retarded  development — they, 
having  branched  off  from  a  common  stock 

[22] 


METHOD 

at  an  early  stage  of  development  or  else 
having  only  slowly  develoi>ed  in  parallel 
natural  lines.  Their  customs  therefore, 
it  is  alleged,  truly  represent  early  mankind 
when  it  was  at  a  like  stage  of  develop- 
ment. With  this  evidence  belongs  also 
the  rich  source  of  survivals  in  popular 
customs  among  civilized  peoples  and  folk- 
lore generally;  these  are  things  which 
have  kept  on  side  by  side  with  the  things 
which  have  outgrown  them. 

The  third  source  is  the  acts  of  children 
while  they  are  developing  from  the 
speechless  to  the  speaking  stage  and  from 
the  speaking  to  the  writing  stage; — the 
modern  theory  being,  as  has  been  said, 
that  the  child  in  developing  repeats  the 
experience  of  its  ancestors,  or,  as  it  is 
said,  "recapitulates  the  history  of  the 
race"  in  this  regard.  This  is  in  the  same 
sense  perhaps  that  children's  games  are 
supposed  by  some  to  reflect  the  hunting, 
the  wars  and  the  domestic  life  of  their 

savage  ancestors. 

[23] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

These  three  sources  are  supposed  to 
cross-check  one  another  and  supply  gaps 
in  one  another,  and  each  might  be  fol- 
lowed out  separately  in  detail,  but  for 
purposes  of  this  talk  it  will  be  convenient 
rather  to  treat  as  one  historical  progress, 
illustrated  from  the  customs  and  habits  of 
modern  savages,  folk  customs,  and  the 
psychology  of  children. 

That  part  of  methodology  which  has 
to  do  with  the  bibliography  of  the  subject 
in  its  various  aspects  will  be  reserved  for 
the  end  of  the  talk. 


[24] 


§  5-  Antediluvian  libraries.     General 

There  are  several  classes  of  alleged  li- 
braries, which  if  they  have  real  existence 
must  necessarily  precede  all  others. /These 
include  the  libraries  of  the  gods,  animal 
or  plant  libraries,  Preadamite  and  Co- 
adamite  libraries  and  the  alleged  libraries 
of  the  antediluvian  patriarchs^  All  of 
these  may  be  included  under  the  term 
antediluvian  and  the  period  subdivided 
chronologically  into  Adamite  or  Patri- 
archal, Preadamite,  Prehuman  (plant  and 
animal  libraries)  and  Precosmic  (libraries 
of  the  gods)  ! 

There  is  a  considerable  literature  on 
the  subject  of  antediluvian  libraries  (cf. 
Schmidt,  Bibliothekswissenschaft,  1840, 
p.  67;  Richardson  in  Library  Journal,  15, 
1890,  pp.  40-44),  but  this  term  has  been, 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

until  recently,  used  to  include  mainly  li- 
braries which  were  alleged  to  have  existed 
from  Adam  to  Noah,  Modem  explora- 
tions in  comparative  psychology  on  the 
one  hand  and  comparative  mythology  on 
the  other  have  however  now  brought  to 
light  many  potential  or  alleged  libraries 
from  before  Adam — not  forgetting  that 
this  first  ancestor  of  ours  has  quite  re- 
cently been  dated  some  sixty  million  years 
before  the  Christian  era ! 


[26] 


§  6.  Libraries  of  the  gods 

The  oldest  of  all  alleged  libraries  are 
the  libraries  of  the  gods. 

Rlmost  all  the  great  god  families,  In- 
dian, Egyptian,  Babylonian,  Persian, 
Greek,  and  Scandinavian,  had  their  own 
book-collections,  so  it  is  said.  According 
to  several  religions  there  were  book-col- 
lections before  the  creation  of  man;  the 
Talmud  has  it  that  there  was  one  before 
the  creation  of  the  world,  the  Vedas  say 
that  collections  existed  before  even  the 
Creator  created  himself,  and  the  Koran 
maintains  that  such  a  collection  co-existed 
from  eternity  with  the  uncreated  God^j  It 
is  obviously  idle  to  try  to  trace  libraries 
back  farther  than  this. 

Brahma,  Odin,  Thoth,  and  substantially 
all  the  creator  gods  who  are  described  in 
terms  of  knowledge  or  words,  are  each 
[27] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

sometimes  in  effect  looked  on  by  the 
mythologists  as  himself  an  incarnate  li- 
brary and  sometimes  even  the  books  of 
which  he  is  composed  are  specified.") 

On  the  other  hand,  by  many  all  creation 
was  looked  on  as  a  library.  (  To  the  an- 
cient Babylonians  the  stars  of  heaven 
were  themselves  books  in  which  could  be 
read  the  secrets  of  heaven  and  earth  and 
the  destiny  of  mankind.)  The  whole 
firmament  was  thus  a  library  of  celestial 
tablets — tablets  of  destiny  or  tablets  of 
wisdom  from  the  "house  of  wisdom", 
which  was  before  creation,  or  carried  upon 
the  breast  of  the  world  ruler.  "The 
Zodiac  forms  the  Book  of  Revelation 
proper  .  .  .  the  fixed  stars  .  .  .  the  com- 
mentary on  the  margin"  (cf.  Jeremias. 
Art.  Book  of  Life,  in:  Hastings  ERE.) 

This  belief,  developed  into  the  so-called 
science  of  astrology,  had  a  prodigious  in- 
fluence even  on  the  political  history  of 
mankind  through  its  effect  on  the  de- 
[28] 


LIBRARIES  OF  THE  GODS 

cisions  and  acts  of  kings.  The  conviction 
that  the  will  of  the  gods  as  to  future 
events  was  here  written  down,  stored  up 
and  might  be  read,  was  at  times  the  con- 
trolling factor  in  the  shaping  of  human 
events. 

Two  of  the  most  famous  libraries  of 
the  gods  are  those  of  Br^^hrr)^  and  of 
Odin.  The  books  of  Thoth,  equally  or 
more  famous,  belong  to  a  somewhat  dif- 
ferent class.  Brahma's  library  contained 
or  was  the  Vedas — themselves  in  fact  a 
large  collection  of  various  works.  These 
were,  it  is  alleged,  preserved  in  the  mem- 
ory of  the  omniscient  Brahma  and  at  the 
beginning  of  this  present  age  they  were, 
in  the  modern  language  of  an  ancient 
Sanskrit  writer,  Kalkuka  Bhatta  "drawn 
out".  Attention  has  been  called  to  the 
fact  that  this  library  was  represented  as 
a  classified  library  with  notation  founded 
on  the  points  of  the  compass ! 

"From  the  eastern  mouth  of  Brahma 

[29] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

.  .  .  issued  .  .  .  the  rich  verses  .  .  . 
From  his  southern  mouth  .  .  .  the  yajash 
verses.  .  .  .  From  the  western  mouth 
.  .  .  the  saman  verses  and  the  metics. 
.  .  .  From  the  northern  mouth  of  Vedas 
(Brahma)  was  manifested  the  entire 
Atharvana"  (Muir.  3:12).  This  library 
was,  it  should  be  noticed,  quite  up  to  date 
in  having  the  special  collections  kept  in 
separate  rooms  with  separate  exits.  It 
was  also,  it  appears,  not  a  mere  reference 
library  but  books  were  issued  for  outside 
use. 

Brahma's  library  was  represented  in 
various  other  forms  e.g.,  as  the  milk  of 
the  cow  goddess  or  the  juice  of  the  Soma 
plant,  and  in  the  same  way  Odin's  collec- 
tion of  words  or  knowledge  is  represented 
in  various  forms  e.g.,  as  the  milk  of  the 
goat  Heidrun,  the  water  of  the  fountain 
of  memory,  the  apples  of  Iduna,  which 
were  the  fruit  of  the  tree  of  knowledge 
and  the  blood  of  the  wise  Kvaser. 

[30] 


LIBRARIES  OF  THE  GODS 

That  which  best  identifies  the  mead, 
which  is  the  source  of  the  immortality  of 
the  gods  themselves  and  without  which 
they  languish  and  die,  with  books,  is  the 
story  of  Kvaser.  Kvaser  was  the  wisest 
of  all  the  gods  (Fooling  of  Gylfe  54). 
The  dwarfs  put  him  to  death  and  gave 
out  that  he  had  drowned  himself  in  his 
own  wisdom,  but  in  fact  they  slew  him 
for  this  wisdom,  which  was  his  blood. 
This  was  drawn  off  into  a  kettle  called 
Odrorer  ("that  which  moves  the  mind") 
and  mixed  with  honey  was  most  carefully 
kept  in  jars.  Drinking  out  of  these  jars 
makes  an  ordinary  man  "a  poet  and  man 
of  knowledge"  but  the  mead  is  most  jeal- 
ously kept  to  renew  the  life  of  gods  and 
poets  (Brage's  talk  3  sq.)  and  grudged 
to  mortals.  Once  Odin,  hard  pressed  in 
flight,  let  fall  a  few  drops  of  this  essence 
of  knowledge,  and  this  scanty  supply 
eagerly  caught  up  by  mortals  produced 
the  rabble  of  bad  poets. 
[31] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

This  collection  of  jar-fulls  of  knowl- 
edge was  an  obvious  library  and  recalls 
the  fact  that  almost  all  the  mythologers 
represent  books  or  knowledge  as  food 
or  drink,  kept  in  jars.  It  is  not  wholly 
excluded  that  this  great  series  of  myths 
came  from  the  earliest  practice  of  keeping 
clay  tablets  or  papyrus  rolls  in  clay  jars, 
precisely  similar  to  the  jars  in  which 
wine,  oil  and  grain  were  kept  in  some 
treasure  houses.  But  however  that  may 
be  the  soma  of  India,  the  haoma  of  Persia, 
as  well  as  the  Scandinavian  mead  and  the 
ambrosia  and  nectar  of  classical  times, 
were  all  looked  on  as  concrete  knowledge 
and  as  such  the  food  and  drink  of  the 
spiritual  or  immortal  life — a  very  reason- 
able philosophy. 

These  libraries  of  the  gods  should  not 
be  confused  with  real  collections  of  books 
of  alleged  superhuman  authorship  like  the 
books  of  the  Old  Testament,  which  are 
not  claimed  by  any  to  have  been  written 

[32] 


LIBRARIES  OF  THE  GODS 

before  1200  or  1500  B.C.,  or  the  collec- 
tions of  actual  oracles  delivered  at  Del- 
phis,  Dodona  or  other  shrines,  or  even 
with  the  forged  oracles  of  Greece,  or  the 
apocryphal  Jewish  and  Christian  books. 
All  these  were  actual  historical  book  col- 
lections and  the  question  whether  author- 
ship was  really  superhuman  or  not  is 
indifferent  at  this  point  which  has  to  do 
with  the  libraries  which  the  gods  are  al- 
leged to  have  had  for  themselves  before 
man  was. 


[33] 


§  7-  Animal  and  plant  librariesf 

The  modern  psychologists,  by  the 
science  which  they  call  comparative  psy- 
chology, have  gradually  been  robbing  hu- 
manity of  much  that  it  used  to  plume 
itself  upon  as  its  own  unique  possession. 
Among  the  last  strongholds  to  yield  were 
reason  and  language,  and  the  defenders 
of  these,  although  retreating,  are  hardly 
yet  put  to  rout.  Even  if  the  articulate 
speech  of  the  parrot  and  the  jackdaw  is 
only  "imitation",  and  the  alleged  lan- 
guage of  the  apes  a  delusion,  still  it  is 
something  of  an  open  question  whether 
the  sounds  and  gestures  which  animals 
use  with  one  another  are  not  really  of  the 
nature  of  language.  The  fox  who  doubles 
on  his  track  in  order  to  lead  the  dogs  on 
a  false  scent  is  getting  very  close  to  lan- 

[34] 


SUBHUMAN  LIBRARIES 

guage  in  a  rudimentary  sense,  and  the 
dog  who  sits  up  or  barks  for  food  or 
wags  his  tail  to  express  good  will,  per- 
haps nearer  still. 

It  is  a  long  step,  however,  from  even 
developed  oral  and  gesture  language  to 
record,  and  it  is  still  generally  denied 
that  among  the  traits  of  our  kinship  with 
the  beasts  any  evidence  has  been  discov- 
ered of  what  can  be  called  record  keep- 
ing. If  this  were  true,  then  it  would  seem 
to  follow  that  the  animal  ceased  to  be 
animal  and  became  man  precisely  when 
he  invented  and  began  to  practice  record 
keeping — in  short  that  libraries  mark  the 
very  beginning  of  the  human  race! 

On  the  other  hand,  however,  it  cannot 
be  ignored  that  the  psychologists  are  pub- 
lishing monographs  on  the  arithmetic  of 
animals  and  the  memory  for  facts  among 
animals,  and  scores  of  other  monographs 
on  the  minds  of  animals.  There  are  those 
too  who  claim  that  the  dog  even  marks 

[35] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

the  place  where  he  caches  his  surplus  of 
bones,  and  certainly  the  bringing  home  of 
a  dead  woodchuck,  in  order  to  show  his 
master  what  he  has  done,  comes  very  close 
to  that  keeping  and  exhibiting  of  human 
trophies  which  is  recognized  as  among  the 
beginnings  of  "handwriting".  If  it  is 
true  that  the  animals  do  make  conscious 
marks  to  g^ide  them  back  to  hidden  ob- 
jects, or  even  that  they  do  have  memory 
for  facts,  which  is  true  memory,  then 
possibly  the  beginnings  at  least  of  memory 
libraries  and  perhaps  of  external  records 
must  in  the  future  be  sought  in  the  animal 
world.  The  ancient  Egyptians,  of  course, 
found  it  there  when  they  made  the  writ- 
ing ape  author,  owner,  and  keeper  of 
books.  Perhaps  after  six  thousand  years 
modern  psychology  is  about  to  catch  up 
with  this  idea!  Whether  or  not  future 
psychology  discovers  anything  like  actual 
record  collections  and  memory  libraries 
among  the  animals,  it  remains  true  that 

[36] 


SUBHUMAN  LIBRARIES 

the  study  of  comparative  psychology 
does  lead  into  the  beginnings  of  memory 
and  helps  therefore  to  the  study  of  the 
real  nature  of  human  memory-books  and 
memory  libraries,  while  again  it  leads  into 
the  question  of  the  nature  of  gesture  lan- 
guage, and  gesture  is  the  own  father  of 
hand-written  books.  When  true  libraries 
have  been  discovered  among  animals  it  will 
be  time  enough  to  take  up  the  question  of 
plant  libraries.  Nevertheless  it  may  be 
said  that  the  question  of  "memory" 
among  plants  is  seriously  discussed  and 
plants  may  perhaps  receive  impression  as 
sensitively  as  animals.  It  is  a  little  figur- 
ative to  say  that  a  tree  which  carries  in 
itself  a  hundred  annual  records  of  its 
growth  is  a  library  in  the  sense  of  a 
public  record  office  which  keeps  the  an- 
nals of  a  nation's  growth  for  a  like  period. 
There  is  however  a  certain  analogy  which 
the  discussions  of  natural  records  and  ob- 
ject writing  suggests  may  even  have  some 
[37] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

slight  germ  of  scientific  interest.  Of 
course  where  there  is  memory  there  may 
be  groups  of  memorized  records  which 
would  be  collections  of  very  rudimentary 
"Books",  but  so  far  the  weight  of  evi- 
dence seems  to  be  against  the  existence 
even  in  animals,  let  alone  plants,  of  that 
kind  of  memory  which  retains  perma- 
nently fixed  forms  of  expression.  Sub- 
human libraries  may  therefore  be  for  the 
present  left  to  the  fabulists  and  put  with 
apocryphal,  legendary  and  mythological 
libraries  outside  the  pale  of  the  real  or 
historical  libraries. 


[38] 


§  8.  Preadamite  libraries 

Whatever  psychologists  and  mythol- 
ogists  may  have  to  say  about  libraries 
before  the  existence  of  the  human  race, 
there  seems  to  be  a  surprising  consensus 
of  opinion  that  book  collections  must  have 
started  at  latest  very  soon  after  man  him- 
self. A  great  number  of  such  libraries 
are  claimed  by  the  ancients  for  the  period 
between  Adam  and  Noah,  and  if  there 
were  human  beings  before  Adam,  as 
many  say,  it  is  likely  that  there  were  at 
least  memory  libraries,  for,  as  will  be 
seen  later  in  discussing  memory  libraries, 
these  are  almost  inseparable  from  human 
nature.  And  further  than  this  it  appears 
from  those  very  same  sources,  which  so 
fluently  allege  and  describe  the  library 
of  Adam,  that  the  books  of  Adam's  li- 

[39] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

brary  represent  such  an  advanced  stage  in 
the  evolution  of  handwritten  records  as 
to  necessitate  a  long  library  history  pre- 
vious to  his  time.  These  books  included 
e.g.,  it  is  said,  inscriptions  cut  in  stone, 
and  such  inscriptions  imply  centuries  if 
not  tens  of  centuries  of  knot  and  other 
mnemonic  forms  of  writing,  preceding. 
Therefore  if  Adam's  library  was  as  de- 
scribed in  its  literature,  there  must  have 
been,  for  a  long  time  before,  Preadamite 
libraries ! 

Moreover  if  those  writers  on  the  Pre- 
adamites  are  correct  who  hold  that  Adam 
was  the  father  of  the  Caucasian  race  only, 
(M'Causland.  Adam  p.  282),  and  that 
Mongols  and  negroes  at  least  (M'Caus- 
land. Babel  p.  277)  were  already  exist- 
ing when  Adam  was  created,  then  of 
course  all  negro  or  Mongol  libraries  are 
preadamite  survivals !  It  is  true  that  such 
writers  represent  culture,  and  by  implica- 
tion libraries,  to  have  been  introduced  to 
[40] 


PREADAMITE  LIBRARIES 

the  Mongols  from  the  Adamite  line  and 
by  Cain,  but  if  premises  are  granted,  the 
inference  is  complete,  that  primitive  li- 
braries of  all  kinds  at  least  up  to  the 
time  of  phonetic  records  were  Preadamite 
in  origin  and  were  shared  by  Mongol  and 
negro  races  as  well  as  by  the  Caucasian 
Adamites!  For  that  matter  some  of 
these  ancient,  if  not  veracious  sources  as- 
sert that  Adam  was  the  inventor  of  the 
alphabet,  which  makes  the  matter  even 
clearer,  throwing  even  syllabic  written  li- 
braries, not  to  mention  ideographic  libra- 
ries, back  into  the  Preadamite  period ! 

For  those  who  care  to  follow  up  this 
fruitful  but  not  profitable  subject,  some 
guide  to  the  extensive  literature  on  the 
Preadamites  will  be  given  farther  along. 


[41] 


§   9-   Adamite  and  Patriarchal  libraries 
before  the  Flood 

The  very  considerable  literature  on 
Antediluvian  libraries  which  has  been  al- 
ready mentioned  is,  in  general,  confined 
chiefly  to  the  line  of  the  patriarchs,  whom 
the  various  writers  on  the  Preadamites 
often  describe  as  Adamites  to  distinguish 
thus  the  patriarchal  or  Caucasian  line 
from  its  Mongolian  and  Negro  contempo- 
raries— Adam,  Cain,  Abel,  Seth,  Noah, 
Ham,  etc. 

According  to  some  of  these  veracious 
historians,  on  the  seventh  day  of  the  first 
month  of  the  first  year  Jehovah  wrote  a 
work  on  the  creation  in  several  volumes, 
primarily  to  teach  Adam  the  alphabet,  and 
secondarily,  to  preserve  the  record  of  the 
creation.     This   seems   to   have   formed 

[42] 


ADAMITE  LIBRARIES 

Adam's  entire  library,  until  the  fall.  Af- 
ter this,  however,  Jehovah  published  a 
new  edition  of  this  work  in  one  volume 
on  stone,  and  added  another  work  on  an- 
other stone.  These  were  placed  by  him 
in  a  "Beth"  or  "House"  on  a  mount  east 
of  the  Garden  of  Eden,  where  were  also 
the  Cherubim.  This  was  according  to 
them  the  first  library  building,  and  by  in- 
ference t^p  ^Q^viJ^jmjyprp  ihe  ^rst  ^^^^- 
j;ians.  This  library  was  bequeathed  by 
Adam  to  Seth  and  by  Seth  to  Enoch.  It 
formed  a  part  of  the  library  of  Noah,  and 
was  consulted  by  Moses,  who  incorpor- 
ated, it  is  alleged,  from  it  the  Elohistic 
and  Jehovistic  documents  into  Genesis. 

The  libraries  of  Cain,  Seth,  Enoch  and 
Ham  were  also  famous  among  these  old 
chroniclers — Seth's  for  its  astrological 
and  astronomical  works,  and  Ham's  for 
the  heretical  works,  which  he  was  not  al- 
lowed to  take  into  the  ark  with  him. 

Far  the  most  famous  however  of  all 

[43] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

these  libraries  is  the  library  of  Noah.  It 
contained  that  of  Adam,  with  very  many 
additions.  At  the  time  of  the  flood  Noah 
was  commanded  to  bury  his  books — "the 
earliest,  middle,  and  recent" — in  a  pit  dug 
at  Sippara — and  from  this  it  appears  that 
the  library  must  have  been  very  large 
since  there  was  room  in  the  ark  for  all 
kinds  of  animals,  but  not  enough  for  the 
books. 

After  the  flood  this  library  was  dug  up 
by  Noah,  and  preserved  in  his  Beth  at 
Nisibis,  or,  according  to  Berosus,  was  dug 
up  by  the  sons  of  Noah,  after  their  father 
had  been  translated,  and  formed  the 
nucleus  of  the  Babylonian  libraries.  A 
legend  of  the  digging  up  of  the  library 
still  exists,  it  is  said,  on  the  spot,  where 
re-excavations  are  now  going  on. 

The  Hindu  account  of  this  library  (Sir 
William  Jones'  works.  I,  288)  has  an  in- 
teresting variation.  It  states  that  the 
flood  came  because,  the  sacred  books  hav- 

[44] 


ADAMITE  LIBRARIES 

ing  been  stolen  away,  men  had  become 
wicked.  After  the  deluge  Vishnu  slew 
the  thief,  and  restored  the  books  to  Noah. 

If  Cassianus  may  be  believed,  however, 
these  buried  books  were  not  all  of  Noah's 
library  since  he  took  with  him  into  the 
Ark  at  least  a  select  collection,  presum- 
ably for  use  on  the  voyage. 

Nor  were  these  the  only  libraries  sup- 
posed to  have  been  in  existence  when  the 
flood  came,  for  the  Egyptian  priests  told 
Solon  of  many  libraries  which  were  de- 
stroyed by  it.  One  rather  wonders  at 
this  too,  for  in  those  days  of  course  they 
were  apt  to  make  their  books  fire  and 
water  proof  (rather  than  the  buildings  as 
now)  and  the  flood  should  not  have  hurt 
them,  but  if  they  were  in  fact  destroyed 
it  simply  shows  that  they  were  made  of 
papyrus,  leather  or  unbaked  clay! 

These  writers  not  only  tell  us  in  detail 
about  many  of  the  books  which  Noah 
must  have  had  in  his  library,  but  even  in 

[45] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

some  cases  give  us  a  list  of  the  books 
themselves.  We  find  thus  e.g.  that  the  li- 
brary must  have  contained  the  following 
works  at  least  by  Adam  (a)  "De  nomini- 
bus  animantium",  (b)  a  census  report  of 
the  Garden  of  Eden,  which  included  all 
living  things,  (c)  The  92d  psalm,  (d)  A 
poem  on  the  creation  of  Eve,  and  various 
other  works,  all,  it  is  to  be  presumed, 
written  after  the  fall;  for  the  very  same 
authentic  chroniclers  who  ascribe  these 
works  to  Adam  declare  that  he  was  born 
at  three  o'clock,  sinned  at  eleven,  was 
"damnatus"  at  twelve  of  one  day  and 
driven  out  of  Eden  early  next  morning' — 
which  left  little  time  for  literary  work  on 
his  part,  one  may  suppose,  while  in  Eden. 
The  library  must  have  contained  also, 
if  our  sources  are  correct,  works  by  Eve 
("conversation  with  the  serpent"),  Cain, 
Scth,  Enos,  Enoch,  Methuselah  and 
others,  and  various  works  by  Noah  him- 
self, including  his  history  of  the  world 
[46] 


ADAMITE  LIBRARIES 

to  his  own  time,  written  before  the  flood 
and  pubHshed  in  two  editions,  one  on 
wood  and  one  on  stone. 

The  surviving  samples  of  these  alleged 
works  are  not  calculated  to  make  one  re- 
gret anything  about  the  deluge  so  much 
as  its  failure  to  be  more  thorough.  Take 
e.g.  Adam's  poems  on  the  creation  of  Eve. 
Imagine  Noah's  sons,  "In  the  Spring- 
time, when  a  young  man's  fancy  lightly 
turns  to  thought  of  love",  drawing  out 
a  tablet  or  two  of  this  poem  for  inspira- 
tion and  reading  how  calmly  the  new 
bride  is  invited  by  Adam  to  "shake  hands 
and  kiss  him" ! 

The  efforts  to  date  the  library  of  Adam 
have  been  various.  A  terminus  ad  quern 
is  offered  by  Berosus,  who  asserts  that- 
the  capital  of  the  world  before  the  Flood 
was  named  "The  Library"  or  the  "Book 
All".  He  puts  this  at  250,000  years  B.C., 
but  this  of  course  implies  considerable 
development  between  Adam  and  the  time 
[47] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

when  the  world  was  populous  enough  to 
need  a  capital  at  all.  There  is,  therefore, 
no  necessary  conflict  between  the  vera- 
cious Berosus  and  the  veracious  modern 
historians  of  science,  who  place  the  term- 
inus a  quo  at  sixty  million  years  ago. 
There  is,  however,  considerable  discrep- 
ancy between  even  the  later  of  these  two 
on  the  one  hand  and  the  very  earliest  of 
the  one  hundred  and  forty  different  dates 
between  3483  and  6984  B.C.  actually  as- 
signed by  more  timid  historians  of  the 
beginnings  of  Adamic  civilization.  As 
sober  historians  are  bound  to  confess  that 
at  best  the  historical  evidence  for  some 
243,016  years  on  the  one  hand  and  59,- 
748,087  or  so  years  on  the  other  of 
Berosus'  date  is  not  wholly  continuous 
and  6984  B.C.  may  be  regarded  as  about 
the  earliest  exact  date  known  to  have  been 
ventured  for  Adamite  libraries. 

It  hardly  needs  to  be  added  that  all 
these  alleged  patriarchal  books  and  libra- 

[48] 


ADAMITE  LIBRARIES 

ries  are  apocryphal  although  many  of 
them  have  a  respectable  antiquity  of  more 
than  two  thousand  years  and  most  of  them 
belong  either  to  pre-Christian,  early 
Christian  or  Mohammedan  times.  They 
have  been  by  no  means  without  their  in- 
fluence on  human  thought  and  on  the 
actions  of  those  who  believed  their  state- 
ments to  be  historical  truth.  They  are 
therefore  not  to  be  ignored  in  reckoning 
the  influences  which  have  shaped  library 
development. 


[49] 


§   lo.  Prehistoric  and  historic  libraries 

Leaving  aside,  however,  all  kinds  of 
imaginary  libraries,  mythological,  fabu- 
lous, legendary  or  apocryphal,  we  still 
have  for  real  human  libraries  a  very 
resi>ectable  historical  and  prehistorical 
antiquity. 

This  long  period  may  be  divided  into 
prehistoric  and  historic  or  beginnings  and 
later  history — the  prehistoric  period  or 
period  of  beginnings  being  understood  to 
be  the  time  before  chronological  record 
by  years,  or  before  the  time  of  abundant 
and    decipherable    hand-written    records. 

On  the  whole,  the  term  "beginnings", 
is  better  for  the  early  periods  than  the 
term  "prehistoric  period".  "Beginnings" 
in  this  point  of  view  differs  from  "pre- 
historic period"  simply  in  overlapping  a 

[so] 


PREHISTORIC  UBRARIES 

very  little  the  shifting  and  uncertain 
borderland  between  the  old  prehistoric 
and  historic,  carrying  over  just  far  enough 
onto  the  firm  land  of  annual  chronological 
history  to  insure  a  safe  footing  in  the  field 
where  written  records  beg^n  to  abound. 

In  the  case  of  books  and  libraries  this 
line  of  division  is  most  clearly  made  at 
the  invention  of  phonetic  writing,  and 
this  seems  to  correspond  pretty  well  in 
time  with  the  point  of  abundant  written 
sources  and  of  definite  chronological  data 
in  the  general  history  of  mankind. 

In  terms  of  relative  chronology  this  line 
corresponds  fairly  with  the  first  dynasty 
of  Egypt.  No  doubt  in  its  real  begin- 
nings it  shades  back  far  beyond  its  dis- 
tinguishable first  appearance  at  this  time, 
but  in  broad  terms  it  begins  for  Egyp- 
tians and  Sumerians  about  this  time,  and 
even  if  this  was  not  the  earliest  point  of 
its  appearance,  it  is  the  point  at  which 
the  earliest  abundant  well  dated  and  un- 

I5i] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

derstood  phonetic  records  are  found. 
What  time  we  shall  count  this  to  be  in 
terms  of  annual  chronology  depends  alto- 
gether by  about  looo  years  on  whether 
we  accept  the  views  of  the  school  of 
chronology  illustrated  by  Breasted's  His- 
tory or  that  for  which  Flinders  Petrie  is 
champion  and  in  the  same  way  with  the 
Sumerian  where  King  stands  for  the  re- 
duced chronology.  When  doctors  dis- 
agree, prudent  conservatism  suggests  the 
acceptance  of  that  minimum  amount  on 
which  both  agree,  in  this  case  about  3400 
years  of  the  pre-Christian  era.  Without 
prejudice,  therefore,  to  the  possibility 
that  Flinders  Petrie  may  be  right  in  put- 
ting the  first  dynasty  a  thousand  years  or 
so  earlier,  and  remembering  that  even 
Breasted  accepts  a  predynastic  historic 
period  extending  to  4500  B.C.  with  a 
strictly  historic  period  from  "the  earliest 
fixed  date  in  the  history  of  the  world"  in 
4241  B.C.,  the  division  between  phonetic 

[52] 


PREHISTORIC  LIBRARIES 

records  and  earlier  forms  of  written  docu- 
ments may  be  taken  as  falling  at  about 
3400  B.C.  At  this  time  the  invention  of 
alphabetic  writing  was  still  perhaps  two 
thousand  years  in  the  future  but  writing 
of  some  kind,  mnemonic  and  picture  writ- 
ing, had  already  been  practised  for  per- 
haps two  thousand  years  or  even  much 
more.  The  beginnings,  or  the  prehistoric, 
prcphonetic  and  predynastic  period  of  li- 
braries, lie  therefore  back  of  the  phonetic 
writing  of  3400  B.C. — in  picture  book 
libraries,  mnemonic  libraries,  object  and 
memory  libraries. 


[53] 


§  II.  The  evolution  of  record  keeping 

These  four  classes  of  libraries,  memory 
libraries,  pictorial  object  libraries,  "mne- 
monic" libraries,  and  picture  book  libra- 
ries, form  thus  the  field.  All  of  them 
existed  before  what  may  be  called  histor- 
ical libraries  ;  all  are  found  among  un- 
civilized peoples  of  all  times;  all  have 
their  faint  remainders  in  popular  custom 
among  modern  civilized  nations,  and 
suggestions  of  all  may  be  found  in  child- 
study.  Three  of  these  classes,  memory 
libraries,  mnemonic  libraries  and  picture 
book  libraries,  correspond  to  well  recog- 
nized book  forms.  The  term  "mnemonic", 
which  is  commonly  used  to  include  quipus, 
message  sticks,  wampum,  and  similar  rec- 
ords, is  itself  not  a  very  exact  term,  since 
all  outward  symbols,  whether  representa- 


RECORD  KEEPING 

tive  or  coriventional,  are  mnemonic.  More- 
over, what  is  generally  meant  by  the  term 
is  the  use  as  symbols  of  objects  which  do 
not  represent  or  directly  suggest  their 
meaning — in  short,  of  object  signs  with 
conventional  rather  than  pictured  meaning 
but  as  a  matter  of  fact  image  signs  with 
conventional  meaning  i.e.  all  ideograms 
or  phonograms  are  equally  "mnemonic" 
with  conventional  objects.  A  better  dis- 
tinction is  therefore  into  the  memory  li- 
braries, object  libraries  (including  both 
representative,  or  pictorial,  object  sign 
collections  and  conventional  object  sign 
collections)  and  image  libraries  (includ- 
ing also  both  representative  or  pictorial 
images  and  arbitrary  or  conventional 
signs).  For  practical  purposes,  however, 
we  may  perhaps  use  the  terms,  memory, 
object,  mnemonic,  and  picture,  under- 
standing by  object,  pictorial  object,  by 
mnemonic,  mnemonic  object  and  by  pic- 
ture,   pictorial    image,    as    distinguished 

[55] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

from  the  mnemonic  or  conventionalized 
images  known  as  ideograms  and  phono- 
grams. To  avoid  confusion  in  this  matter 
it  must  be  kept  clearly  in  mind  that  writing 
is  not  picture  writing  because  its  symbols 
are  pictures,  but  because  they  picture 
something.  If  an  ox's  head  or  its  image 
(aleph  or  alpha)  stands  for  an  ox  it  is 
pictorial  writing  but  if  it  stands  for 
"divinity"  it  is  ideographic  and  if,  as  it 
usually  does,  it  stands  for  the  sound  "a" 
it  is  phonetic-alphabetic  writing:  It  is 
pictorial  writing  only  when  it  suggests  its 
own  meaning. 

Again  it  must  be  said  that  pictorial 
writing  is  not  confined  to  image  writing 
as  is  usually  implied  by  the  phrase  "pic- 
ture writing"  but  applies  just  as  well  to  ob- 
jects. A  real  ox's  head  and  horns  may  mean 
"ox"  or  "divinity"  or  "a"  just  as  well  as 
a  painting,  drawing  or  sculpture  of  it. 

Yet  again  it  should  be  noted  that  the 
picture  of  an  ox's  head  is  itself  an  object 
[56] 


RECORD  KEEPING 

as  truly  as  the  head  itself.  The  two  kinds 
of  objects  might  be  called  real  or  original 
objects  and  image  objects  but  for  short 
"objects"  (originals)  and  "images"  serve 
well  enough.  Again  it  should  be  remem- 
bered that  an  object  is  not  a  real  object 
because  it  is  in  three  dimensions  or  pic- 
tures necessarily  drawings  or  paintings. 
A  petroglyph  is  as  suitable  for  "picture" 
writing  as  a  painting  (indeed  most  hiero- 
glyphics are  sculptured  not  drawn  or 
painted).  On  the  other  hand  a  petroglyph 
is  no  more  an  "object"  than  a  painting  or 
drawing  is. 

With  these  distinctions  in  mind  the  fol- 
lowing table  of  the  kinds  of  symbols  used 
in  ancient  records  will  make  clear  the 
kinds  of  primitive  libraries. 

(A)   Objects 

(i)   Pictorial 

(2)   Conventional  (Mnemonic) 

(a)  Ideographic  (eye  images) 

(b)  Phonetic  (ear  images) 
(aa)   verbal 

[57] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

(bb)   syllabic 
(cc)    (consonantal) 
(dd)   alphabetic 
(B)  Images 

( 1  )   Pictorial 

(2)   Conventional  (Mnemonic) 

(a)  Ideographic 

(b)  Phonetic 
(aa)  verbal 
(bb)   syllabic 

(cc)    (consonantal) 
(dd)  alphabetic 

For  each  of  these  kinds  of  "written" 
records  there  is  a  corresponding  kind  of 
library  or  record  collection. 

The  question  of  the  order  of  evolution 
among  these  various  kinds  of  record  col- 
lections is  closely  bound  up  with  that  of 
the  evolution  of  language  and  handwrit- 
ing, the  very  invention  of  handwriting 
probably  implying  a  feeling  of  need  for 
kept  records. 

The  commonly  recognized  ways  of  hu- 
man utterance  are  gesture  and  oral 
speech. — the  one  appealing  to  the  eye,  the 
other  to  the  ear,  and  each  leaving  its  rec- 
[58] 


RECORD  KEEPING 

ord  probably  at  different  points  and  in 
different  molecular  form  in  the  brain. 
Hand  gesture  came  in  course  of  time  to 
be  the  highest  type  of  gesture  language, 
evolving  as  it  did  into  a  highly  complex 
and  adaptable  type  of  language,  and  mod- 
em hand  writing  is  simply  a  form  of  hand 
gesture  which,  by  means  of  ink  or  lead 
or  chisel,  or  some  other  material  or  instru- 
ment, leaves  a  trail  of  the  hand  move- 
ment in  permanent  record. 

The  question  whether  gesture  language 
preceded  sound  language  may  perhaps  be 
settled  by  the  answer  to  the  question 
whether  in  the  evolution  of  living  beings 
the  eye  preceded  the  ear.  If  in  the  age 
of  reptiles  one  saw  the  other  glide  or  the 
grass  move  before  he  heard  a  swish  or 
hiss,  and  if  he  himself  first  stayed  still  in 
order  to  escape  being  seen  rather  than 
heard,  then  doubtless  gesture  language 
began  before  sound  language,  and  doubt- 
less  again   also  language   began   among 

[59] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

men  with  simple  gestures  rather  than  sim- 
ple cries.  The  biologists  say  in  fact  that  re- 
action to  light  came  earlier  than  reaction 
to  sound,  eye  before  ear,  and  if  this  is 
true,  gesture  language  doubtless  preceded 
oral  speech.  But,  however  it  may  be 
about  simple  utterance,  when  it  comes  to 
the  matter  of  permanent  external  docu- 
mentary record  of  utterance,  it  is  clear 
enough  that  the  records  of  gesture  pre- 
ceded the  records  of  sound,  and  for  some 
six  thousand  or  eight  thousand  years, 
more  or  less  up  to  yesterday,  the  only 
permanent  records,  or  records  in  external 
material,  were  gesture  records.  Even 
phonetic  writing,  so  called,  is  not  sound 
record  but  a  record  of  sounds  translated 
into  gestures;  writing  is  a  gesture  sign 
which  stands  for  a  sound,  not  a  record 
of  sound.  It  is  only  within  our  own  gen- 
eration that,  through  the  invention  of  the 
phonograph,  oral  or  other  sound  utter- 
ance has  been  recorded  in  permanent  ma- 
[60] 


RECORD  KEEPING 

terial  and  libraries  of  sound  records  made 
possible. 

The  written  recording  of  even  signs 
for  sounds  did,  however,  in  the  evolution 
of  record  keeping  mark  a  very  decided 
advance  over  all  previous  methods.  It 
was  as  great  an  advance  perhaps  as  ar- 
ticulate speech  itself  is  over  gesture  lan- 
guage or  pantomime,  and  even  greater 
than  the  next  great  step  in  human  evolu- 
tion, the  invention  of  alphabetic  writing. 
It  was  certainly  a  longer  step  in  time  from 
the  very  first  beginnings  up  to  this  point 
than  from  here  to  the  alphabet,  perhaps 
longer  than  from  3400  B.C.  to  1913  A.D., 
and  the  period  of  premnemonic  record 
collections,  therefore,  it  may  be  said  in 
all  seriousness,  is  perhaps  longer  than  all 
later  periods  of  library  history  put 
together. 

The  very  first  rudiments  of  record 
keeping  were  doubtless  developed  in  the 
animal  mind  long  before  it  learned  ex- 

[61] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

pression  to  other  animals  and  are  to  be 
found  in  the  results  recorded  in  its  very 
structure,  of  its  reactions  to  its  environ- 
ment. Certainly  they  began  at  the  point 
where  any  experience,  say  of  contact  with 
an  obstacle,  left  such  record  that  on  the 
next  occasion  action  was  taken  in  view  of 
the  previous  experience. 

The  first  attempt  at  expression  or  the 
effort  of  one  individual  to  communicate 
an  idea  to  another  by  signs  may  have  been 
a  mere  movement  to  attract  the  attention 
of  the  other  to  the  simple  fact  of  its  ex- 
istence, and  the  first  record  of  expression 
may  have  been  the  simple  memory  of  this 
movement  in  the  other's  mind. 

However  this  may  be,  in  the  course  of 
time  and  among  human  beings  memory 
was  the  first  record  and  as  long  as  life 
was  so  simple  that  a  man's  memory  was 
sufficient  for  his  own  record  uses  and  he 
felt  no  need  of  communicating  to  a  dis- 
tance, whether  in  space  or  time,  the  ne- 
[62] 


RECORD  KEEPING 

cessity  of  external  records  was  not  felt. 
As  soon,  however,  as  the  number  of  a 
man's  cattle  or  cocoanut  trees,  or  the  con- 
tents of  his  hunting  bag  got  beyond  his 
count  (perhaps  beyond  the  number  of  his 
fingers  and  toes)  or  he  felt  the  need  of 
sending  a  message  of  defiance,  peace,  or 
ransom  to  a  neighboring  tribe,  or  from 
a  hunting  party  back  to  the  cave  or  wig- 
wam, he  began  to  make  visible  records — 
objects,  specimens,  images,  and  conven- 
tional signs  of  one  sort  or  another.  As 
the  art  progressed  and  became  more  and 
more  complex,  pictures  of  objects  and 
pictures  of  gestures  became  the  usual 
form  of  record  until  finally  these  pictures 
were  recognized  as  standing  for  certain 
groups  of  sounds  and  phonetic  writing 
had  been  invented. 

Very  soon  after  the  introduction  of 
phonetic  writing  documents  began  to 
abound  and  the  chances  of  survival,  there- 
fore,  to  multiply.     The   Palermo  stone 

[63] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

seems  to  show  that  actual  records  by  reig^ 
and  by  year  of  reign  began  in  Egypt  as 
early  as  the  first  king  of  the  first  dynasty. 
However  that  may  be,  within  a  few  cen- 
turies of  this  time  records  and  collections 
of  records  in  Egypt  had  become  abundant 
and  varied,  and  these  contained  economic 
records,  records  of  political  and  religious 
events,  laws,  censuses,  etc.,  at  least.  In 
Babylonia  too,  long  before  32CX)  B.C.,. 
there  had  been  collections  of  laws,  and  a 
great  variety  of  economic  and  religious 
documents. 

In  brief  it  may  be  said  therefore  that 
about  3400,  or  at  least  3200  B.C.,  the  vast 
number  of  documents,  the  finn  establish- 
ment of  phonetic  record,  the  pains  taken 
to  insure  permanence  and  the  suggestions 
of  methodical  arrangement  and  custody 
point  to  the  beginning  of  a  strictly 
historic  period. 


[64] 


§   12.  Memory  libraries 

The  earliest  form  of  library  was,  it  is 
to  be  supposed,  the  memory  library.  This 
term  is  not  fanciful  and  does  not  in  any 
sense  attempt  figuratively  to  identify  the 
human  memory  as  such  with  the  library. 
A  few  years  ago  this  could  have  been  done 
in  an  interesting  way  because  a  favorite 
analogy  for  conceiving  the  human  brain 
was  the  system  of  pigeon-holes  with  dif- 
ferent sorts  of  ideas  classified  and  put 
away  in  their  respective  compartments 
furnishing  a  very  exact  analogy  to  a  clas- 
sified library.  This  analogy  is  now  found 
less  useful  than  terms  of  brain  paths  or 
other  figures,  although  the  actual  geomet- 
rical location  of  each  word  in  brain  tissue 
in  the  case  of  memory  is  still  not  excluded 
and  this  possibility  must  have  its  bearing 

[65] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

on  the  psychological  study  of  memory 
libraries. 

What  is  meant  here  by  the  memory  li- 
brary refers  to  the  modern  psychological 
study  of  inward  speech  and  inward  hand- 
writing. This  accounts  for  the  existence 
of  inward  books  and  collections  of  books, 
and  a  collection  of  inward  books  is  ob- 
viously a  real  library.  It  makes  little  dif- 
ference where  or  how  these  are  kept  in 
the  brain.  They  doubtless  imply  a  library 
economy  at  least  as  different  from  that 
of  printed  and  bound  books  as  the  books 
themselves  are  different  from  papyrus 
rolls,  clay  tablets,  or  phonographic  rec- 
ords, but  it  is  a  real  collection  of  books 
and  the  psychological  study  of  the  place 
and  manner  of  their  housing  and  the 
method  of  their  arrangement  and  prompt 
service  to  the  owner  for  his  use  is  not  a 
matter  of  analogy  or  figure  of  speech. 

The  essence  of  the  book  is  a  fixed  form 
of  words.  The  point  is  that  a  certain 
[66] 


MEMORY  LIBRARIES 

form  of  words  worked  into  a  unity  is 
preserved  in  exactly  that  form.  The 
author  looks  at  it  as  a  whole,  prunes,  cor- 
rects, substitutes  better  words  for  inferior 
ones,  and  generally  works  over  it  as  a  man 
works  over  a  painting  or  statue.  At  the 
end  of  the  process  when  the  book  is  fin- 
ished it  is  a  fixed  form  of  words,  a  new 
creation,  an  individuality.  The  ordinary 
habit  of  thought  and  conversation  does 
not  reach  this  point  of  fixed  forms  of 
words  although  in  the  case  of  very  reten- 
tive memories,  where  the  complete  verbal 
form  of  conversation  is  remembered,  it 
approaches  it.  In  general  men  seldom  re- 
member the  exact  phraseology  when  they 
listen  to  a  sermon  or  a  story.  On  the 
other  hand,  however,  the  actor  or  the  pro- 
fessional story  teller  can  summon  at  will 
the  exact  verbal  form  of  a  great  number 
of  works  and  each  of  these  works  is  prop- 
erly a  book.  This  permanent  fixing  of 
form  undoubtedly  implies  some  substance 

[67] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

in  which  the  words  are  recorded,  but  if 
that  substance  is  the  human  brain  the  re- 
sult is  no  less  a  book,  a  real  record  in  the 
real  substance,  than  if  recorded  in  out- 
ward substance  such  as  stone  or  ink. 

The  practice  of  keeping  such  inward 
records  of  exact  fixed  forms  of  words  is 
not  only  the  oldest  form  of  record  keep- 
ing and  one  extensively  practised  in  il- 
literate periods,  but  it  is  commonly  prac- 
tised in  modern  life  by  orators  who  speak 
without  notes,  and  as  a  method  for  the 
teaching  of  children  before  they  learn  to 
read  ("memorizing")  as  well  as  after- 
wards in  the  schools. 

Among  savage  peoples  the  medicine 
man  is  often  a  library  of  tribal  tradition 
although  the  modern  ethnologists  agree 
that  he  was  by  no  means  the  only  profes- 
sional repository  of  tribal  records.  The 
ancient  Mexicans,  for  example,  seem  to 
have  had  special  secular  chroniclers  whose 
business  it  was  to  memorize  public  events, 
[68] 


MEMORY  LIBRARIES 

and  to  be  a  sort  of  walking  public  records 
office,  memorizing  public  accounts  of  all 
sorts  as  well  as  the  story  of  events.  Ac- 
cording to  many  critics  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment this  primitive  method  continued  the 
chief  or  only  method  of  transmitting  rec- 
ords in  Palestine  for  2000  years  after  it 
had  given  place  to  writing  in  Egypt  and 
Babylonia.  They  hold  that  the  Penta- 
teuch was  formed  and  transmitted  by 
such  oral  verbal  tradition.  The  Vedic 
books  were,  it  used  to  be  alleged,  gath- 
ered and  handed  down  by  a  rigorous  or- 
ganized system  of  memorizing,  and  this 
has  a  certain  counterpart  in  modem  times 
in  that  memorizing  of  the  Confucian 
books  and  of  the  Koran  which  forms  a 
chief  part  of  the  system  of  education  in 
the  respective  cases.  The  strictness  with 
which  this  method  of  transmission  of 
memory  books  has  been  carried  out  to  the 
point  of  fixing  every  word  and  even  let- 
ter is  perhaps  best  illustrated   from  the 

[69] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

Jewish  oral  tradition  as  to  the  sounds  of 
the  vowels  which  apparently  continued 
oral  for  centuries  before  they  were  repre- 
sented by  the  vowel  point  signs. 

Whether  blind  Homer  composed  his 
songs  and  recited  them  throughout 
Greece  without  reducing  to  writing  or 
not,  he  might  have  done  so  and  would 
have  done  as  many  another  before  him  in 
doing  so.  As  a  matter  of  fact  the  exca- 
vations of  the  last  dozen  years  show  pretty 
clearly  a  pre-Homeric  Greek  writing,  and 
Homer  himself  indeed  once  refers  to  the 
written  tablet.  But  however  that  may  be, 
the  race  of  minstrels  began  long  before 
Homer  and  still  exists.  In  the  Middle 
Ages  they  were  each  a  walking  library, 
often  with  a  very  large  repertory,  and 
the  same  is  often  true  to-day  among  their 
successors  the  actors,  reciters  and  the 
lecturers.  The  learning  of  poems  and 
declamations  by  school  children  often  re- 
sults in  an  inward  collection  of  definite 

[70] 


MEMORY  LIBRARIES 

verbal  forms  in  considerable  numbers. 
A  more  complex  form  of  memory  li- 
brary is  that  of  certain  ancients  who  are 
alleged  to  have  organized  their  slaves 
into  a  system,  each  of  the  slaves  being  as- 
signed a  certain  number  of  works  in  a 
certain  class  to  learn  by  heart  and  kept 
ready  on  call  to  recite  when  any  one  of 
these  should  be  desired. 

These  inward  or  memory  libraries  may 
be  distinguished  into  two  chief  kinds.  As 
a  matter  of  fact  there  are  almost  as  many 
different  kinds  of  inward  books  as  there 
are  outward  books,  but  as  the  two  chief 
ways  of  expression  are  voice  and  gesture, 
so  the  records  of  oral  speech  and  gesture 
language,  received  by  eye,  ear,  or  touch, 
and  inwardly  recorded,  are  the  chief  kinds 
of  memory  books.  These  are  quite  dis- 
tinct as  to  their  processes  of  reception  and 
record,  and  very  possibly  occupy  different 
areas  of  the  brain.  These  differences  may 
in  part  be  realized  from  common  obser- 

[71] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

vation,  but  one  must  take  pains  to  guard 
against  the  assumption  that  the  inward 
record  is  a  photograph.  It  is  entirely  pos- 
sible that  the  brain  record  of  the  sound 
"man"  differs  as  much  from  a  picture  of 
a  man  as  the  thread  of  a  phonographic 
record  does.  The  same  is  true  as  to  the 
inward  record  of  a  picture  word  or  alpha- 
betical handwritten  word.  The  inward 
record  may  no  more  be  a  microscopic  pic- 
ture than  the  stenographic  sign  is. 
Nevertheless  it  is  not  hard  to  realize  that 
there  is  somehow  within  a  series  of  re- 
corded impressions  which  may  be  called 
images,  some  of  which  recall  sounds  and 
others  objects  or  gestures.  The  inward 
language  may  or  may  not  have  to  do  with 
sounds.  Modern  pantomime  and  the  sign 
language  of  deaf-mutes  and  Indians  are 
languages,  and  it  is  entirely  possible  to 
store  in  one's  mind  an  exact  series  of 
sig^s  telling  a  story  in  gesture  language, 
just  as  it  is  possible  to  store  the  symbols 
for  sounds  or  oral  speech. 
[72] 


MEMORY  LIBRARIES 

One  of  the  most  interesting  chapters  in 
the  antiquities  of  ancient  nations  and  of 
modern  savage  tribes  is  the  story  of  litur- 
gical rites,  sacred  dances,  symbolic  pro- 
cessions, and  the  like.  Savage  dances  e.g. 
sometimes  rehearse  events  of  the  hunt  or 
war  or  domestic  scenes.  In  many  of  these 
cases  what  may  be  called  historic  events 
are  represented  and  the  whole  ceremony  is 
a  rehearsal  of  these  events,  although 
wholly  in  gesture  expression,  with  gesture 
or  object  symbols  and  without  speech.  It 
is  the  recital  of  visually  memorized  rec- 
ords in  visual  symbols,  but  the  records  are 
just  as  truly  definite  accounts  of  events, 
or  records,  or  books  if  you  like,  as  if  they 
were  oral  words  remembered  and  ex- 
pressed by  voice  or  in  writing.  In  re- 
ligious dances  and  dramatic  religious 
ceremonies,  the  traditional  representa- 
tions were  of  ideas  rather  than  events — 
the  nature  of  the  world  and  man,  the 
future  world  and  the  means  of  attaining 

[73l 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

this, — and  these  formed  groups  and  se- 
quences of  transmitted  ideas  quite  as  defi- 
nite to  the  initiated  as  if  expressed  orally 
or  in  writing. 

In  the  ceremonial  processions  of  the 
Egyptians  and  in  the  (jreek  mysteries, 
these  representations  often  become  very 
elaborate  and  were,  apparently,  in  the 
secret  mysteries,  often  accompanied  by 
oral  explanations  by  the  exegete.  It  is 
possible  that  in  the  case  of  both  Greek 
and  Egyptian  mysteries  the  transmission 
had  even  ceased  to  be  exclusive  memory 
transmission,  and  that  written  records,  or 
at  least  mnemonic  tokens  of  some  elabo- 
rateness, were  preserved  in  the  various 
chests  or  baskets  carried  in  the  cere- 
monies. However  that  may  be,  these 
were  at  least  the  more  elaborate  historical 
successors  of  symbolic  dances  and  other 
ceremonies,  transmitted  among  primitive 
men  through  visual  and  muscular  sense 
memory,  just  as  poems  were  preserved  in 

[74] 


MEMORY  LIBRARIES 

auditory  images  and  transmitted  by  oral 
utterance. 

The  significant  point  is  that  whether 
the  ritual  used  in  the  mysteries  was  trans- 
mitted in  auditory  or  visual  images,  and 
whether  these  symbols  were  external  and 
kept  in  the  basket  or  chest,  which  was  car- 
ried about  in  the  procession,  or  merely 
kept  in  memory,  they  were,  so  far  as  they 
were  separate,  complete  and  stable  image- 
forms,  real  words,  books,  and  libraries. 


[7Sl 


§   13-  Pictorial  object  libraries 

The  simplest  and  presumably  earliest 
form  of  outward  record  is  the  pictorial 
object  record  i.e.  an  object  "in  which  a 
picture  of  the  thing  is  given,  whereby  at 
a  glance  it  tells  its  own  story"  as  Clodd 
(p.  35)  says  of  the  corresponding  image 
signs  which  form  what  is  commonly 
thought  of  as  "picture  writing".  These 
pictorial  objects  are  distinguished  from 
mnemonic  objects  (quipu,  abacus,  etc.)  as 
pictographic  image  writing  is  from  ideo- 
graphic and  phonetic  writing,  by  the  fact 
that  in  themselves  they  suggest  somehow 
the  things  meant  while  mnemonic  objects 
or  images  require  previous  agreement  or 
explanation. 

The  pictorial  objects  used  for  writing 
may  be  whole  objects  or  parts  of  objects 

[76] 


PICTORIAL  OBJECT  LIBRARIES 

and  they  may  stand  for  individuals  or  for 
classes  of  things,  e.g.  a  goat's  head  may 
stand  for  a  certain  wild  goat  killed  on  a 
certain  hunting  trip  or,  with  numbers  at- 
tached, it  may  stand  for  a  herd  of 
domestic  goats. 

The  earliest  records  were  no  doubt 
whole  object  records  of  individuals. 
When  the  hunter  first  brought  home  his 
quarry  this  had  in  it  most  of  the  essential 
elements  of  handwriting  (those  left  be- 
hind could  read  in  it  the  record  of  the 
trip)  and  when  he  brought  useless  quarry, 
simply  to  show  his  prowess,  it  had  in  it 
all  the  elements  of  the  record,  as  has  in 
fact  the  bringing  by  a  dog  of  a  wood- 
chuck  to  his  master  or  the  bringing  home 
by  a  modern  boy  of  a  uneatable  string  of 
fish  to  "show".  The  bringing  home  from 
war  of  living  captives  to  be  slain,  or  dead 
bodies  to  be  hung  from  the  ship's  prow 
or  nailed  on  the  city  gates,  has  the  same 
motive  and  the  same  record  character.  So 

l77] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

too  the  hanging  of  criminals  on  gibbets 
has  the  character  both  of  the  record-book 
and  the  instruction  book.  In  these  cases 
the  very  object  itself,  is  kept  and  exhibited 
— the  whole  object  (though  without  life). 
Perhaps  the  nearest  approach  to  the  whole 
object  library,  in  the  sense  of  a  perma- 
nent collection  of  records,  was  when  all 
the  permanent  spoils  of  a  campaign  were 
"devoted"  or  "laid  up"  and  kept  together 
for  memorial  rather  than  economic  pur- 
poses in  the  treasury  of  the  temple. 

A  strict  modern  illustration  of  this  case 
is  a  collection  of  battle  flags  taken  or  car- 
ried in  a  certain  war,  campaign  or  battle. 
Or  again  if  a  modem  hunter  should  have 
all  the  spoils  of  a  certain  hunt  stuffed  and 
mounted  as  a  record  of  the  hunt,  this 
would  be  of  the  same  nature — a  whole 
object  record  collection  with  an  object  to 
stand  for  every  individual. 

The  sample  or  specimen  whole  object 
record  as  distinguished  from  the  individ- 

[78] 


PICTORIAL  OBJECT  LIBRARIES 

ual  record  is  in  modern  times  extensively 
known  and  used  in  the  sale  of  goods  by 
travelling  salesmen.  In  its  rudiments  as 
a  means  of  visible  communication  of  ideas 
it  was  doubtless  as  old  and  perhaps  older 
even  than  the  keeping  of  trophies  for  rec- 
ord. If  e.g.  man  was  herbivorous  before 
he  was  carnivorous  then  doubtless  primi- 
tive man  scouting  for  food  would  bring 
back  specimens  for  his  family  just  as  a 
modern  boy  may  bring  in  specimens  of 
the  wild  grapes  or  berries  that  he  has 
found  for  information  of  the  folks  at 
home.  The  best  modem  illustration  of 
the  sample  or  specimen  whole  object  is 
in  museums,  menageries,  zoological  and 
botanical  gardens,  and  the  like,  where 
specimens  of  various  kinds  of  objects  are 
gathered  to  stand  for  classes,  without  any 
special  regard  to  the  number  in  the  class. 

Museums   in   general   illustrate   object 
record.     The  historical  museums  gener- 
ally  and   collections   of   historical   relics 
[79] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

large  and  small,  together  with  mineral, 
plant  or  animal  collections  of  rare  objects, 
otherwise  unknown,  or  species  otherwise 
extinct  (e.g.  the  American  bison)  are  of 
the  nature  of  individual  whole  object  rec- 
ords, while  all  museums  come  so  close  to 
the  idea  of  the  library,  either  in  the  matter 
of  record  or  in  the  purpose  of  message  or 
information,  that  one  is  tempted  to  de- 
scribe museums  as  rudimentary  libraries, 
and  libraries  as  more  complex  museums. 
Art  museums  are  in  this  aspect  a  sort 
of  transition  between  the  museum  proper 
or  whole  object  library  and  the  li- 
brary proper  or  the  image-symbol-record 
collection. 

Whole  object  record  is,  however,  evi- 
dently cumbersome,  and  man,  observing 
this,  early  learned  a  fact  very  significant 
for  the  history  of  handwriting  i.e.  that 
for  record,  reminder,  or  information,  a 
part  of  an  object  may  serve  just  as  well 
as  a  whole  object.  This  principle  of  the 
[80] 


PICTORIAL  OBJECT  LIBRARIES 

abbreviation  of  signs  for  the  sake  of 
economy  is  perhaps  the  most  striking  and 
consistent  principle  in  the  whole  history 
of  handwriting.  It  is  the  principle  which 
led  not  only  from  the  whole  to  the  part 
and  sample  but  from  the  part  object  to  the 
mnemonic  object,  from  object  to  image, 
from  image  to  ideogram,  and  which  pre- 
vails throughout  the  whole  farther  devel- 
opment of  phonetic  handwriting,  during 
which  picture  phonetic  signs  became  more 
and  more  conventionalized,  through  sylla- 
bic writing  into  alphabetic,  and  it  is  the 
law  which  has  produced  the  numerous 
variations  in  the  numberless  historical  al- 
phabets, issuing  also  finally  in  numberless 
systems  of  stenography.  This  abbrevia- 
tion is  very  early  found  in  war  trophies 
and  in  hunting  trophies.  In  war  it  was 
found  that  the  heads,  hands,  ears  or  scalps 
of  enemies  or  even  the  left  hand  or  right 
hand  or  ear,  as  conventionally  agreed 
upon,  was  just  as  good  an  evidence  of 

[8i] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

prowess  and  much  more  transportable 
than  whole  bodies — and  Borneo  and 
Filipino  head  hunters  and  American  In- 
dian scalpers  have  practised  this  discovery 
in  very  recent  times. 

In  the  case  of  hunting  trophies  the  his- 
tory was  the  same.  Actual  bodies  brought 
back  from  a  hunting  trip  were  not  alto- 
gether a  permanent  record,  but  after  the 
tribal  feast  or  sacrifice  (commonly  per- 
haps in  earliest  times  both  in  one)  the 
head  and  skin  remained  and  formed  a  po- 
tentially more  permanent  record.  Even 
in  modern  times  such  skins  may  be  kept  as 
wholes — stuffed  for  museum  purposes  or 
as  hunting  trophies,  and  they  are,  indeed, 
often  mounted  as  rugs  with  both  head  and 
tail  attached.  In  this  stage  they  form 
what  may  be  still  counted  as  whole  object 
records  but  from  this  stage  object  abbre- 
viation followed  as  rapidly  as  in  war 
trophies.  If  the  skin  was  separated  from 
head  and  horns  for  economic  reasons, 
[82] 


PICTORIAL  OBJECT  LIBRARIES 

either  was  found  to  serve  the  purposes  of 
record.  A  man's  collection  of  pelts  e.g. 
is  obviously  a  collection  of  hunting  rec- 
ords as  well  as  a  collection  of  wealth.  The 
Egyptian  determinative  for  quadruped  is, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  picture  not  of  a 
whole  animal  but  of  a  skin  with  tail  and 
without  head.  On  the  other  hand,  head 
and  horns  served  equally  as  well  for 
record  as  skin  and  tail,  whether  the  pur- 
pose was  a  mere  record  of  exploits  or  a 
record  of  sacrifices.  This  precise  stage  is 
amply  represented  in  the  modern  hunting 
lodge  with  its  heads  of  moose  or  other 
animals,  and  it  is  possible  that  the  expres- 
sion so  many  "head  of  cattle"  is  a  relic 
of  this  stage. 

In  each  of  these  cases  the  principle  of 
the  characteristic  part  obtains  i.e.  the  ab- 
breviation is  not  beyond  the  point  where 
the  object  can  be  recognized  at  sight  as 
standing  for  a  certain  animal. 

The  principle  of  the  characteristic  part 

[83] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

once  established,  the  tendency  to  abbre- 
viation for  the  sake  of  economy  in  trans- 
portation, storage,  or  exhibition,  led  rapidly 
to  the  use  of  the  very  simplest  unmistak- 
able part  showing  the  individual  and  then 
to  the  simplest  unmistakable  part  showing 
kind.  In  the  case  of  war-trophies  head 
was  reduced  to  scalp,  and  this  was  con- 
ventionalized again  so  that  the  trophy 
scalp  consisted  of  a  very  small  portion 
from  a  particular  point  on  the  head.  In 
the  case  of  hunting  trophies,  the  head 
was  reduced  to  perhaps  ears  or  horns, 
tusks  or  teeth.  The  process  is  found  defi- 
nitely illustrated  in  the  Cretan  history  in 
the  reduction  of  the  ox's  head  to  simple 
horns  in  ritual  use,  and  vestiges  of  this  are 
probably  also  to  be  found  in  the  symbolic 
use  of  horns  on  altars,  horns  on  men  as 
a  symbol  of  power,  and  the  like.  On  the 
other  hand  the  skin  and  tail  separated 
from  the  horns  followed  the  same  law 
of  progressive  economy  and  was  reduced 

[84] 


PICTORIAL  OBJECT  LIBRARIES 

perhaps  to  the  tail  only  (the  fox's 
brush)  or  the  claws  (the  primitive  claw 
necklaces). 

The  modern  bounty  on  wolf  scalps  con- 
tains the  whole  principle  of  characteristic 
part  abbreviation  up  to  this  point  in  a 
nutshell.  It  is  the  smallest  unmistakable 
readily  recognized  and  nonduplicable 
part.  It  is  important  for  individual  rec- 
ord that  it  should  not  be  possible  to  col- 
lect two  bounties  on  one  wolf  or  to  boast 
of  two  fish  caught  or  two  dead  enemies, 
where  there  has  been  but  one. 

It  is  thus  not  fancy  or  jest  to  say  the 
scalp  belt  of  an  American  Indian  chief 
(albeit  this  did  not  play  such  a  part  in 
the  Indian  world  as  is  commonly  im- 
agined), or  the  tiger-tooth  necklace  of  the 
African  chief,  is  a  collection  of  records 
representing  a  rather  advanced  stage  of 
evolution. 

Abbreviations  in  the  case  of  sample 
records  may  be  carried  one  step  farther 

[8s] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

still,  for  a  single  eagle's  feather  or  a  very- 
small  piece  of  fur  sfhows  kind  just  as 
well  as  a  head  or  tail  or  a  whole  skin. 

Perhaps  the  best  examples  of  collections 
of  record  objects  in  the  most  abbreviated 
forms  are,  for  individual  records,  the  col- 
lections of  trophies  worn  on  the  person, 
and  for  specimen  records  the  medicine 
bag  of  West  Africa. 

Individual  trophy  collections  are  com- 
mon to  all  primitive  peoples  and  every- 
where tended  towards  abbreviated  tro- 
phies which  could  be  worn.  It  would  be 
more  than  rash  to  trace  the  use  of  cloth- 
ing and  all  personal  adornment  to  the 
wearing  of  trophies  as  there  is  some  slight 
temptation  to  do,  but  trophy  necklaces, 
feather  bonnets,  and  the  like,  were  cer- 
tainly worn  in  many  tribes  and  without 
very  much  other  clothing,  either  of  pro- 
tective or  ornamental  character.  The 
leopard's  tooth  necklace  of  the  African 
chief,  recording  the  number  of  leopards 
[86] 


PICTORIAL  OBJECT  LIBRARIES 

slain  by  his  tribe,  and  the  feather  bonnet 
of  the  American  Indian,  are  true  record 
collections.  In  general  all  objects  of 
personal  adornment  among  primitive  peo- 
ples are  symbolic,  that  is,  they  have  mean- 
ing and  are  of  the  nature  of  writing. 
They  are  kept  for  record  rather  than  as 
objects  of  beauty  or  for  the  enhancement 
of  personal  beauty.  Labrets,  for  example, 
are  a  sign  of  aristocratic  birth,  and  even 
if  the  objects  worn  are  ritual  rather  than 
trophy  in  character,  still  each  one  has  its 
symbolic  meaning,  and  the  expert  may 
read  in  each  collection  a  tale  of  events  or 
of  specific  religious  ideas  almost  as  clearly 
as  in  the  phonetic  words  of  a  printed 
book. 

The  West  African  medicine  bag,  like 
other  medicine  bags,  contained  a  collec- 
tion of  so  called  fetish  objects  of  all  sorts 
— bits  of  fur,  feathers,  claws,  hair,  twigs, 
bark,  etc.,  etc. — but  the  use  of  these  ob- 
jects was  not   for  medicine  or  magical 

[871 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

purposes  as  commonly  understood.  They 
formed  obviously  an  object  record  collec- 
tion quite  in  the  nature  of  a  collection  of 
books.  As  each  object  was  drawn  out  of 
the  bag,  the  keeper  of  the  bag  recited 
some  appropriate  tale  or  formula  for 
which  the  object  stood. 

This  probably  casts  light  on  many 
other  so-called  fetish  collections  of  primi- 
tive people,  as  for  example  those  of  the 
North  American  Indians.  "Mooney  says, 
in  describing  the  fetish,  that  it  may  be  a 
bone,  a  feather,  a  carved  or  painted  stick, 
a  stone  arrowhead,  a  curious  fossil  or 
concretion,  a  tuft  of  hair,  a  necklace  of 
red  berries,  the  stuffed  skin  of  a  lizard, 
the  dried  hand  of  an  enemy,  a  small  bag 
of  pounded  charcoal  mixed  with  human 
blood — anything,  in  fact  ...  no  matter 
how  uncouth  or  unaccountable,  provided 
it  be  easily  portable  and  attachable.  The 
fetish  might  be  .  .  .  even  a  trophy  taken 
from  a  slain  enemy,  or  a  bird,  animal,  or 
[88] 


PICTORIAL  OBJECT  LIBRARIES 

reptile."  (Hodge.  HandbAmInd  i  :458.) 
These  fetishes  might  be  kept  in  the 
medicine  sack  (the  Chippewa  pindikosan) 
or  "It  might  be  fastened  to  the  scalp-lock 
as  a  pendant,  attached  to  some  part  of 
the  dress,  hung  from  the  bridle  bit,  con- 
cealed between  the  covers  of  a  shield,  or 
guarded  in  a  special  repository  in  the 
dwelling.  Mothers  sometimes  tied  the 
fetish  to  the  child's  cradle."  (Hodge. 
HandbAmInd  1 1458. ) 

These  fetishes  represent  not  only  events 
but  ideas  (a  vision,  a  dream,  a  thought, 
or  an  action).  They  represent  not  only 
religious  and  mythological  ideas  and 
tribal  records,  but  individual  exploits  in 
war  or  hunting  and  other  individual  rec- 
ords. In  short,  the  medicine  bag  the 
world  over  is  a  collection  of  recorded 
ideas,  both  of  historical  and  mythological 
character  if  not  also  of  an  economic 
character. 

So  far  as  the  "fetish"  objects  are  not 

[89] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

trophy  objects,  but  stand  for  ideas,  they 
form  a  transition  to  the  mnemonic  object, 
but  so  long  as  the  object  is  such  as  to 
suggest  to  the  keeper  and  expounder  the 
idea  of  the  particular  form  of  words  or 
ideas  which  he  relates,  it  is  still  to  be 
counted  as  object  rather  than  mnemonic 
writing  e.g.  if  a  bit  of  fox  fur  suggests 
a  story  of  a  fox,  it  is  still  to  be  counted  a 
pictorial  object  rather  than  a  mnemonic 
object. 

If  twenty  eagle  feathers,  e.g.  stand  for 
twenty  eagles,  or  twenty  small  bits  of  fur 
for  twenty  reindeer,  these  sample  objects 
are  still  used  pictorially,  but  if  a  feather 
head-dress  is  made  of  eagle's  feathers, 
each  feather  symbolizing  some  particular 
exploit,  the  matter  has  passed  over  from 
the  pictorial  to  the  mnemonic  stage. 


[90] 


§   14-  Mnemonic  object  libraries 

Mnemonic  writing,  as  it  is  generally 
treated  in  the  textbooks,  includes  all  sorts 
of  simple  memory  aids,  and  is  generally, 
and  probably  rightly,  regarded  by  writers 
of  palaeography  as  preceding  picture  writ- 
ing, although  there  is  an  element  of  ab- 
stractness  even  in  the  tally  or  knotted 
cord  or  pebble  as  compared  with  the  ac- 
tual imitation  or  representation  of  the 
picture,  and  in  the  evolution  of  human 
thinking,  other  things  being  equal,  the 
abstract  necessarily  follows  the  concrete 
in  time  and  in  the  order  of  evolution. 

The  most  familiar  examples  of  mne- 
monic books  are  the  quipus  or  knotted 
cord  books,  the  notch  books,  which  in- 
clude tallies  and  message  sticks,  the  wam- 
pum belts  of  American  Indians,  and  the 

[91] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

abacus.  Collections  of  any  of  these  kept 
in  the  medicine  tent  or  temple,  or  even 
the  counting  house,  are,  of  course,  true 
libraries,  or  at  least  true  collections  of 
written  documents  as  generally  under- 
stood by  the  historians  of  writing. 

The  knotted  cord  is  best  known  under 
the  name  of  quipu,  which  was  the  name 
for  the  Peruvian  knot  record.  At  bot- 
tom the  idea  does  not  differ  from  the 
simple  tying  of  knots  in  a  handkerchief 
as  a  reminder,  or  the  sailor's  log  line.  It 
has  been  most  commonly  used  for  numer- 
ical records,  but  in  many  cases  it  preserved 
and  transmitted  very  extensive  historical 
records.  One  very  simple  use  was  the 
noting  on  different  colored  cords  by  knots 
the  number  of  the  different  animals  taken 
to  market  for  sale,  and  again  the  price  re- 
ceived for  these  at  market. 

It  is  still  used  among  the  Indians  of 
Peru  and  some  North  American  Indians, 
also  in  Hawaii  and  among  various  Afri- 

[92] 


MNEMONIC  OBJECT  LIBRARIES 

can  tribes,  and  all  over  Eastern  Asia  and 
the  Pacific. 

It  was  the  traditional  method  in  China 
before  the  use  of  written  characters,  and 
the  written  characters  themselves  were, 
it  is  alleged,  made  up  out  of  these  com- 
bined with  the  pictures  of  bird  tracks. 

Among  the  ancient  civilizations  there 
are  many  remains  or  reminiscences  of 
these  knot  books.  They  are  found  among 
the  ancient  Egyptain  hieroglyphics  (as  in 
the  sign  for  amulet  and  perhaps  in  several 
other  signs)  ;  they  appear  also  in  the  mne- 
monic knotted  fringes  to  garments  in  the 
Jewish  antiquities  and,  as  Herodotus  tells 
us,  Darius  made  use  of  such  knots  to  guide 
certain  lonians  who  remained  behind  to 
guard  a  bridge  as  to  when  it  should  be 
time  for  them  to  sail  away.  In  1680  the 
Pueblo  Indians  of  North  America  marked 
the  days  to  their  uprising  in  the  same 
way. 

This  use  of  the  knotted  cord  for  amu- 

[93] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

lets  is  among  the  most  widespread  of 
uses,  being  found  among  the  medicine 
men  of  nearly  all  primitive  peoples.  Juno 
wore  such  an  amulet,  and  Ulysses  carried 
one. 

Among  the  ancient  Peruvians  and 
Mexicans  there  were  many  collections  of 
quipus  in  charge  of  official  recorders. 

Traces  of  ancient  use  survive  in  the 
knots  of  a  cardinal's  hat  and  perhaps 
most  interestingly  of  all  in  the  nautical 
knot  used  in  casting  the  log  or  sounding. 
We  may  still  travel  so  many  knots  an 
hour  or  sink  mayhap  so  many  fathoms 
deep.  The  knotted  measuring  line  with 
fathom  marks  is  probably  the  direct  his- 
torical descendant  of  the  Egyptian  meas- 
uring line  and  by  the  same  token  probably 
of  the  Egyptian  sign  for  one  hundred, 
the  fathom  like  one  of  the  Egyptian  units 
being  at  bottom  the  stretch  of  a  man's 
arm. 

Most  of  the  extant  quipus  have  been 

[94] 


3  6  8  JO. 

I  III 

A  Collection  of  Message  Sticks 

From  Howitt.    Native  Tribes  of  S.  E.  Australia, 

p.   704 


MNEMONIC  OBJECT  LIBRARIES 

found  in  graves.  There  is  a  "very  exten- 
sive collection"  of  these  in  the  American 
Museum  of  Natural  History  in  New 
York,  and  a  recent  study  of  these  (by 
L.  L.  Locke)  concludes  that  they  were 
used  purely  for  numerical  purposes  and 
not  for  counting  but  for  record  keeping. 

The  best  known  notch  books  are  the 
message  sticks  used  in  Australia  and 
Africa  and  the  tally  used  in  the  British 
Exchequer  up  to  a  recent  date  for  the 
keeping  of  accounts.  This  is  the  method, 
famous  in  fiction  for  the  recording  on 
their  knife-hilts  by  Indians  and  super- 
human white  scouts  of  the  number  of 
scalps  taken  in  war.  It  is  the  essence  of 
the  so-called  Clog  Almanac,  the  nick-stick, 
and  other  ways  of  notching  up  accounts 
still  often  found  in  rural  communities. 
The  memory  of  it  survives  in  the  use  of 
the  word  score  or  so  many  tallies,  used  un- 
til recently  of  the  runs  made  in  baseball. 

Collections  of  notch  records  are  found 

[95] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

at  least  among  the  Australian  aborigines 
■ — and  it  will  be  remembered  that  it  was 
the  burning  of  the  huge  collection  of  tal- 
lies in  the  early  part  of  the  last  century 
which  resulted  in  the  setting  fire  to  and 
burning  up  of  the  parliament  houses. 

It  is  possible  that  the  notch  method 
was  preceded  by  a  system  of  stripping  off 
leaves  or  twigs  from  a  branch,  leaving  a 
certain  number.  The  early  pictures  of  Se- 
shait,  goddess  of  writing  among  the 
Egyptians,  who  records  the  years  of  a 
king's  reign,  suggests  possibly  this  method, 
and  in  this  case  perhaps  also  the  Egyptian 
sign  for  year  with  its  single  projection 
may  refer  to  this  method. 

Wampum  is  one  of  the  best  known  and 
most  picturesque  forms  of  mnemonic  ob- 
ject writing.  It  was  used  by  the  Ameri- 
can Indians  for  treaties,  title  deeds, 
memorials  of  events,  etc.,  and  consider- 
able collections  of  these  tribal  records 
were  not  uncommon.     Although  in  itself 

[96] 


MNEMONIC  OBJECT  LIBRARIES 

a  later  and  more  complex  style,  in  essence 
it  stands  for  a  style  still  older  than  the 
knot  writing  which  it  resembles.  Exist- 
ing examples  of  wampum  leave  the  simple 
mnemonic  knot  or  notch  far  behind  and 
have  progressed  even  to  figures  or  pic- 
tures often  of  an  advanced  or  symbolic 
type,  made  in  the  beads,  but  the  beads 
themselves  stand  for  what  may  perhaps 
be  the  very  earliest  form  of  mnemonic 
record — that  is  the  object  record  where 
each  object  is  represented  not  by  a  pic- 
torial object  but  by  some  sample  object 
like  a  pebble  or  a  twig.  The  heap  of  peb- 
bles used  for  counting  was  possibly  the 
very  earliest  mnemonic  record. 

An  extremely  interesting  modern  ex- 
ample of  calculation  in  pebbles  and  the 
representation  by  them  even  of  sums  in 
addition,  multiplication,  and  subtraction, 
turns  up  among  the  psychological  investi- 
gations in  the  matter  of  mathematical 
prodigies.     It  appears  that  most  of  the 

[97] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

famous  lightning  calculators  have  been 
the  children  of  peasants,  and  a  large  part 
of  these  Italian  shepherd  boys,  who  ap- 
parently used  pebbles  for  the  counting  of 
their  sheep  and  amused  themselves  by 
making  a  plaything  of  these.  Other 
lightning  calculators  (Ampere  e.g.)  used 
pebbles,  and  Bidder  a  bag  of  shot,  while 
others  have  taught  themselves  by  the  use 
of  marbles,  peas,  or  the  use  of  their 
fingers.  (Bruce  in  McClure  v,  39,  1912, 
pp.  593-4.)  The  counting  by  pebble 
heaps  is  found  indeed  generally  in  the 
playing  of  children.  When  it  comes  to 
transporting  or  making  more  permanent 
collections  this  was  done  by  means  of  a 
pouch  in  the  case  of  pebbles — one  of  the 
earliest  forms  of  record  holder  and  one  of 
the  most  ancient  forms  even  of  phonetic 
writings,  or  tying  together  in  bundles  as 
in  the  case  of  twig  bundles  found  among 
primitive  peoples,  or  by  stringing  together 
as  in  trophy  necklaces  or  some  forms  of 

the  abacus. 

[98] 


A  Collection  of  Wampum 

American  Museum  of  Natural  History,  N.  Y. 

Nos.  150.1/1945,  1579  A.D.  50/2287,  2902 


MNEMONIC  OBJECT  LIBRARIES 

With  these  mnemonic  object  writings 
is  perhaps  also  to  be  classed  the  symbols 
formed  with  bits  of  wood  used  in  the 
Indian  game  of  Canute  described  by  J.  P. 
Harrington.  "The  San  Ildefonso  Canute 
figures  present  a  symbolism  so  highly  con- 
ventionalized and  so  complex  that  the 
term  language  might  well  be  applied — a 
symbolism  not  essentially  different  in 
origin  or  practice  from  human  speech, 
gesture  language,  African  drum  language, 
conventionalized  graphic  designs  that  have 
a  commonly  understood  meaning,  or 
writing  whether  executed  in  pictograms, 
ideograms,  phonograms,  or  phonetic  sym- 
bols" (AmAnthropol  n.s.  14,  1912,  p. 
265).  "These  figures  are,  it  is  said,  made 
much  in  the  same  fashion  as  children 
graphically  represent  certain  ideas  by 
arranging  small  objects." 


[99] 


§  15-  Picture  book  libraries 

Savage  tribes  in  general  have  not 
progressed  beyond  the  image  stage  of 
writing  or  at  most  beyond  a  sort  of  sylla- 
bic stage  which  corresponds  to  what  we 
know  as  the  rebus.  This  picture  writing 
is  the  known  origin  however  of  all  the 
oldest  historical  writing  systems.  As  we 
all  know,  children  too  read  their  picture 
books  long  before  they  read  print  or  writ- 
ing. Picture  writing  and  picture  books 
have  always  survived  among  cultured  na- 
tions and  have  a  great  vogue  to-day,  es- 
pecially through  the  introduction  of 
pictures  into  newspapers  and  through 
moving  pictures. 

The  earliest  existing  picture  writing  of 
the  Stone  Age  includes  many  images  of 
domestic  animals  in  the  caves  of  the  Pyre- 
[  loo] 


PICTURE   BOOK   LIBRARIES 

nees  with  apparently  conventional  signs 
sometimes  accompanying  them.  Prehis- 
toric picture  writing  in  the  Mediterranean 
regions  includes  also  pottery  marks, 
figures  of  animals  or  parts  of  animals 
used  to  distinguish  ships  and  having  their 
modern  counterpart  in  the  ship's  figure- 
head, also  the  seals,  milk-stones  of  Crete, 
the  rock  carvings  of  Liguria  and  the  like. 

The  very  first  beginnings  of  picture 
writing  are  perhaps  to  be  found  in  natural 
object  images.  The  Chinese  ascribed  the 
origin  of  their  written  characters  to  bird 
tracks,  and  many  primitive  peoples  used 
stones  which  accidentally  resembled  ani- 
mals as  images  of  them. 

Perhaps  the  most  natural  and  earliest 
reading  of  records  is  the  reading  of  foot- 
prints of  hunted  birds  and  animals.  From 
these  tracks  the  expert  woodsman  may 
read  the  kind  and  number  of  individuals 
passing,  the  direction  that  they  are  taking, 
and  many  other  details.    This  fact  is  fa- 

[lOl] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

miliar  with  all  hunting,  and  it  is  famous 
in  the  trailing  of  both  men  and  animals 
by  American  Indians  and  by  primitive 
people  generally.  The  method  is  still 
much  used  in  the  tracking  of  criminals  by 
footprints,  and  more  especially  and  scien- 
tifically in  these  days  by  finger-print 
records.  These  records  are  actual  images 
of  parts  of  individuals,  and  it  is  not  in- 
credible, even  if  not  evidenced,  that  the 
earliest  use  of  writing  by  the  Chinese 
should  have  been  the  imitation  of  birds' 
tracks  in  clay  by  some  hunter  in  order  to 
describe  the  kind  of  birds  that  he  had 
seen. 

It  has  been  mentioned  at  various  points 
in  this  paper  that  the  record  of  number 
is  near,  if  not  at,  the  beginning  of  per- 
manent records,  and  Gow,  in  his  History 
of  Greek  mathematics,  has  a  theory  that 
the  record  of  numbers  above  ten  began  by 
impressing  the  ten  fingers  in  the  moist 
earth. 

[  102] 


Record  Ornament  of  Imitation  Leopard  Teeth 
From  Frobenius.    Childhood  of  Man,  p.  27. 


PICTURE  BOOK  LIBRARIES 

Another  very  early  form  was  the 
natural  rock  having  some  accidental  re- 
semblance to  bird  or  beast,  or  else  formed 
by  very  slight  chipping  of  a  natural 
image,  as  in  some  cases  in  the  Pyrenean 
caves.  Various  American  Indian  tribes 
used  natural  fossils  or  accidental  images 
in  this  way.  The  transition  from  a  slight 
chipping  to  sculpture  is,  of  course,  an 
easy  one. 

Perhaps  the  simplest  and  most  natural 
transition  from  pictorial  object  to  image 
writing  is  suggested  by  the  trophy  records 
of  an  African  chief  as  described  by  Fro- 
benius.  The  actual  record  trophies  of 
leopard  hunting — the  leopard's  teeth — 
are  taken  and  worn  in  a  necklace  by  the 
chief  and  form  a  tribal  record.  The  in- 
dividual making  the  killing  has,  however, 
a  wooden  model  of  the  tooth  which  he 
wears  as  an  individual  trophy.  This 
very  simple  and  natural  proceeding  has 
in  it  the  germ  of  picture  writing, — is 
indeed  picture  writing. 
[  103] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

Among  the  more  primitive  forms  of 
picture  writing  are  tattooing  and  body- 
painting.  Tattooing  is  used  among  many 
savage  tribes  to-day  and  all  over  the 
world.  This  was  known  in  the  most  an- 
cient times  and  is  often  practised  to-day 
especially  by  sailors  and  boys,  sometimes 
quite  elaborately.  Among  the  savage 
tribes  it  was  used  for  religious,  political, 
and  economic  purposes.  One  use  was  as 
identification  mark.  This  might  be  a 
tribal  mark  or  individual  mark,  and  in 
either  case  is  very  closely  connected  with 
the  totem  idea.  In  either  case  it  might 
also  be  used,  and  was  used,  as  a  property 
or  ownership  mark  to  which  the  tattoo 
mark  corresponded.  This  is  perhaps 
linked  with  the  ancient  Egyptian  tattooing 
through  the  tribal  mark  of  the  modem 
Nubian. 

The  war  paint  of  the  American  Indian 
is  as  old  as  the  Stone  Age  in  the  Mediter- 
ranean and  is  made  most  curiously  inter- 
[  104] 


PICTURE  BOOK  LIBRARIES 

esting  by  a  considerable  number  of  so 
called  Pintadores  still  existent.  These 
Pintadores  form  the  earliest  known  step 
in  the  history  of  printing,  for  they  consist 
of  stamps  with  which  the  paint  could  be 
applied  in  various  figures  after  the  fashion 
of  the  modern  rubber  stamp.  These 
figures,  like  the  war  paint  of  the  Ameri- 
can Indians,  probably  had  various  sym- 
bolic meanings  according  to  the  figures 
and  the  colors  used,  and  it  is  not  beyond 
the  bounds  of  possibility  that  there  were 
libraries  of  printed  books  in  this  Stone 
Age — if  by  any  chance  collections  of 
sample  impressions  from  these  stamps 
were  kept  for  any  purpose.  At  any 
event,  when  applied  they  formed  what 
some  people  would  call  a  living  library. 
Certain  tablets  possibly  used  for  a  similar 
purpose  have  been  found  also  among  the 
North  American  Indians. 

Body  and  face  painting  naturally  pre- 
ceded tattooing — the  latter  being  simply 

[105] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

a  method  of  making  the  record  perma- 
nent. The  methods  may  or  may  not 
have  arisen  from  the  marks  made  by  the 
pressure  of  trophy  necklaces,  bracelets, 
etc.,  on  the  skin,  or  from  being  etched  by 
the  sun  on  the  unprotected  skin  of  light 
complexioned  tribes.  However  they  may 
have  arisen,  these  two  methods  of  skin 
marking  are  among  the  very  early  forms 
of  record,  were  often  used  to  record  ex- 
ploits or  events,  and  sometimes  to  record 
an  extraordinary  number  and  variety  of 
matters.  It  seems  also  to  be  established 
that  these  body  pictures  were  sometimes 
intended  as  copies  of  trophy  necklaces  or 
other  ornaments. 

There  are  many  ways  beside  skin  marks 
in  which  the  idea  of  image  making  might 
have  suggested  itself  to  primitive  man, 
inheriting  as  he  perhaps  did  from  an  ani- 
mal ancestry  a  strong  instinct  for  imita- 
tion— the  shadow,  reflection  in  water, 
actual  fossils  of  animals,  the  etching  of 
[io6] 


TuPAi   Cupa's   Tattoo  Marks,   Showing  A   Group 

OF  Various  Rfxords 

From   Parson's  Story  of  Ne\v  Zealand,  p.   i6 


PICTURE  BOOK  LIBRARIES 

sunburn,  the  silhouette  of  a  tree  or  ani- 
mal against  the  horizon,  natural  stone 
forms,  tracks  in  clay,  etc.' — ^but  in  skin 
marks,  natural  or  artificial,  we  see  the 
transition  process  in  actual  operation. 

The  fact  that  savages,  when  they  took 
off  their  detachable  ornaments  to  go  to 
war  or  for  ritual  dances  and  the  like,  put 
on  paint,  suggests  possibly  that  the  painted 
forms  are  images  of  the  things  removed. 

Primitive  picture  writing  on  other  ma- 
terials than  human  skin  is  found  all  over 
the  world.  It  may  be  drawn,  painted, 
engraved,  chiseled,  modeled,  moulded, 
woven  or  inlaid.  The  petroglyphs  or  abo- 
riginal rock  carvings  (more  often  engrav- 
ings) and  the  paintings  are  the  most 
typical  kinds  although  perhaps  not  the 
most  common.  Both  of  these  kinds  are 
found  all  over  the  world;  most  famously 
perhaps  among  the  Australians,  the  Bush- 
men and  the  North  American  Indians. 
The  use  by  the  North  American  Indians 

[107] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

is  said  to  have  reached  its  highest  devel- 
opment among  the  Kiowa  and  the  Dakota 
tribes  in  their  calendars.  "These  calen- 
dars are  painted  on  deer,  antelope,  and 
buffalo  hides,  and  constituted  a  chron- 
ology of  past  years.  The  Dakota  calen- 
dars have  a  picture  for  each  year  .  .  . 
while  that  of  the  Kiowa  has  a  summer 
symbol  and  a  winter  symbol,  with  a  pic- 
ture or  device  representing  some  note- 
worthy event"  (Hodge).  It  is  said  of  the 
petroglyphs  that  they  "record  personal 
achievements  and  happenings  more  fre- 
quently than  tribal  histories  .  .  .  are 
known  often  to  be  the  records  of  the 
visits  of  individuals  to  certain  places, 
signposts  to  indicate  the  presence  of  water 
or  the  direction  of  a  trail,  to  give  warn- 
ing or  to  convey  a  message  .  .  .  and 
many  of  them  .  .  .  [are]  connected  with 
myths,  rituals,  and  religious  practices" 
(Hodge).  "Sometimes  a  man  painted 
his  robe  in  accordance  with  a  dream,  or 

[io8] 


PICTURE  BOOK  LIBRARIES 

pictured  upon  it  a  yearly  record  of  his 
own  deeds  or  of  the  prominent  events  of 
the  tribe."  "The  horses  of  warriors  were 
often  painted  to  indicate  the  dreams  of 
the  war  experiences  of  their  riders." 

In  the  matter  of  abbreviation  it  was  in 
image  writing  as  in  object  writing.  It  be- 
gins with  whole  object  images  and  passes 
through  various  stages  of  abbreviation 
until  it  goes  over  from  the  pictorial  to 
the  mnemonic  stage. 

In  image  writing  this  process  has  many 
illustrations  running  back  to  the  cave 
drawings  where  the  head  or  horns  of  an 
ox  or  goat  are  given  instead  of  the  whole 
animal.  This  convention  was  used  over 
the  whole  Mediterranean  region  and  ap- 
parently became  the  direct  ancestor  of  the 
Hebrew  aleph,  the  Greek  alpha,  and  our 
modern  English  a.  The  letter  a  as  now 
used  in  the  alphabet  appears  to  be  the  end 
of  a  long  historical  process  of  convention- 
alizing by  which  user  after  user  has  tried 

[109] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

to  simplify  the  strokes  required  more  and 
more  or,  as  the  modem  complacent  "in- 
ventors" of  the  ancient  principles  which 
they  now  call  "efficiency"  would  say,  "re- 
duce the  motions  required"  until  the 
present  form  has  been  reached. 

In  image  writing  too  is  more  clearly 
seen  the  development  of  what  may  be 
called  sample-and-number  abbreviation. 

The  earliest  way  of  representing  sev- 
eral animals  seems  to  have  been  the  mak- 
ing several  like  symbols — one  for  each. 
Five  oxen,  e.g.  are  expressed  by  five 
pictures.  It  is  entirely  natural  that  when 
a  man  is  writing  the  same  picture  several 
times,  one  after  another,  and  knows  that 
others  will  know  it  to  be  a  repetition,  the 
process  of  conventionalizing,  which  goes 
on  so  fast  under  ordinary  circumstances, 
should  go  even  faster,  until  pictures  four 
and  five  become  simple  scrawls  and  in  the 
course  of  time  the  whole  is  reduced  to 
practically  a  single  picture  and  four 
[no] 


PICTURE  BCMDK  LIBRARIES 

straight  lines.  Here  we  have  the  indi- 
vidual record  and  the  sample  record 
combined. 

True  picture  writing  is  not  very  com- 
mon on  the  ancient  monuments  and  is 
chiefly  to  be  studied  in  the  primitive  writ- 
ings of  uncivilized  tribes  such  as  the  Bush- 
men and  the  North  American  Indians. 
There  are,  however,  both  in  the  Assyrian 
and  Egyptian  hieroglyphics  many  traces 
of  the  older  pictures  from  which  these  are 
derived  and  the  idea  of  the  picture  writ- 
ing is  seen  in  great  fullness  in  the  de- 
terminatives of  the  Egyptian  writing, 
although  it  is  likely  that  these  are  not  so 
much  remains  as  restorations.  They  con- 
sist, as  is  well  known,  of  pictures  which 
suggest  something  of  the  meaning  of  the 
word,  e.g.  all  words  related  to  writing 
are  followed  by  the  pictures  of  the  scribe's 
palette,  with  pen  and  ink  moistener.  This 
suggests  at  once  that  the  word  has  some- 
thing to  do  with  writing.    It  is  likely  that 

[III] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

the  attaching  of  these  to  phonetic  sig^s 
was  the  result  of  finding  that  there  were 
so  many  words  which  had  the  same 
sounds. 

A  very  simple  example  of  picture  writ- 
ing is  given  in  Hoffman  (p.  95)  with  its 
explanation.  A  canoe  with  a  torch  in  the 
bow,  three  bucks  and  a  doe,  the  sign  for  a 
lake,  and  the  picture  of  two  wigwams  tells 
the  story  of  a  hunting  expedition  by 
torchlight  on  the  lake  from  which  three 
bucks  and  a  doe  were  brought  back  to  the 
wigwam.  A  slightly  more  complex  one 
is  given  in  Figure  3,  which  is  the  record 
of  a  shaman's  curing  of  a  sick  man.  A 
more  complex  one,  given  on  page  26,  with 
its  explanation  on  pages  170-72,  is  the 
mnemonic  song  of  an  Ojibway  medicine 
man. 

One  method  of  picture  writing  shows 
an  action  by  several  successive  stages  of 
the  same  act.  This  is  most  commonly  a 
picture  of  corresponding  gesture   signs. 

[112] 


PICTURE  BOOK  LIBRARIES 

The  picture  writing  by  successive  pic- 
tures, showing  successive  stages  of  a 
story,  is  a  favorite  method  in  the  modern 
German  humorous  illustrated  papers,  and 
has,  of  course,  its  perfect  modern  counter- 
part in  the  cinematograph. 

Any  collection  of  wampum  belts,  birch 
bark,  calendar  skins,  blankets,  or  other 
picture  writing  records,  is  of  course  a 
picture  library  which  has  already  begun 
to  take  on  the  distinct  character  of  the 
modern  library. 


[113] 


§   1 6.  Ideographic  records 

Ideograms  are  the  mnemonic  stage  of 
image  writing.  They  may  be  recogniz- 
able pictures  but,  if  so,  their  meanings 
have  no  relation  to  the  picture  itself.  The 
head  of  an  ox,  for  example,  when  it 
stands  for  an  ox  is  picture  writing,  but 
when  it  stands  for  divinity  or  for  the 
sound  "a"  it  is  an  ideogram.  All  hiero- 
glyphic and  alphabetic  writing  is,  there- 
fore, in  a  way  ideographic,  but  we  are 
accustomed  to  distinguish  phonetic  writ- 
ing and  to  leave  for  ideograms  proper 
only  those  pictures  which  appeal  to  eye 
rather  than  ear.  Some  people  read  even 
alphabetical  printed  words  as  ideograms 
— the  word  suggests  its  object  directly 
without  being  translated  into  its  sounds. 
Some,   on  the  other  hand,   cannot   read 

[114I 


IDEOGRAPHIC  RECORDS 

even  to  themselves  without  thinking  in 
sounds  or  even  moving  the  lips. 

Ideographic  records  so  shade  into  the 
picture  writing  or  the  pictorial  image  rec- 
ord on  the  one  hand  and  into  phonetic 
writing  and  the  book  form  common  and 
appropriate  to  phonetic  writing  on  the 
other,  that  it  is  not  easy  to  single  out  any 
examples  of  exclusive  ideographic  record 
collections,  although  of  course  such  col- 
lections are  entirely  conceivable,  and  the 
earliest  traces  of  Egyptian  or  Sumerian 
hieroglyphics  seem  to  suggest  the  stage 
where  documents  were  in  ideograms  of 
whole  words,  but  at  this  stage  ideogram 
and  phonogram  would  be  almost  indis- 
tinguishable as  it  would  be  a  subjective 
matter  as  to  whether  it  suggested  to  any 
given  individual  a  visual  image  directly  or 
only  indirectly,  through  an  ear  picture. 


[IIS] 


§   \y.  Types  of  primitive  libraries 

Various  illustrations  of  the  different 
kinds  of  primitive  libraries,  possible  or 
actual,  have  already  been  suggested. 
These  may  be  summarized  as  private  rec- 
ord collections  and  tribal  record  collec- 
tions, as  pictorial,  mnemonic,  and  mixed, 
as  object,  image,  and  mixed,  and  as 
priestly  and  secular.  The  matter  may  be 
made  perhaps  a  little  more  concrete  by 
considering  two  types  as  to  which  we  do 
not  have  to  rely  on  historical  allusion,  but 
of  which  we  have  concrete  examples — 
votive  offering  collections  and  libraries 
for  the  dead.  With  votive  offering  col- 
lections are,  of  course,  to  be  associated 
the  medicine  bag,  amulets,  magical  charm 
collections,  and  that  whole  class  of  primi- 
tive  records   or   symbolic   objects   which 

[ii6] 


TYPES 

center  in  the  religious  head  of  the  tribe. 
The  Hbraries  for  the  dead,  consisting  as 
they  do  of  objects  buried  with  the  de- 
ceased, are  essentially  collections  of  per- 
sonal records  corresponding  with  the 
modem  private  library.  Collections  of 
public  records,  not  kept  with  the  religious 
collections,  are  well  attested  among  primi- 
tive people,  and  existed  from  very  early 
times  in  Egypt  and  Babylonia,  but  on  the 
whole  the  inference  of  anthropology 
seems  to  be  that  up  to  the  neighborhood 
of  the  historical  period  the  head  of  the 
tribe  was  both  priest  and  king,  as  the 
Czar  of  Russia  is  both  Emperor  and  head 
of  the  orthodox  church,  and  religious  and 
political  collections  one.  The  priest  king 
seems  to  have  been  the  rule  even  in  early 
historical  times,  and  temple  and  royal 
archives  one,  differentiated  only  as  the 
numbers  of  the  nation  and  the  complexity 
of  the  civilization  grew.  At  all  events, 
we  have  abundant  remains  of  temple  col- 

[117] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

lections  of  symbolic  objects  or  so-called 
"votive  offerings",  including  much  unmis- 
takable "writing"  and  we  have  also  a  con- 
siderable number  of  examples  of  similar 
objects  buried  with  the  dead,  from  very- 
various  localities  all  over  the  world. 

The  objects  gathered  together  at 
shrines  are  commonly  known  as  votive  of- 
ferings, but  the  actual  uses  and  reasons 
for  their  collection  are  much  more  various 
than  is  suggested  by  the  ordinary  mean- 
ing of  the  votive  offering,  while,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  most  of  such  objects  are 
not  offerings  at  all,  but  only  substitute 
object  image  records  of  such  offerings,  or 
even  mere  symbols  for  offerings.  A  good 
type  of  this  latter  class  is  the  Chinese 
sacrifice  which  consists  in  writing  prayers 
on  a  piece  of  paper  and  burning  the  paper. 
But  there  are  thousands  of  illustrations  in 
actual  collections  of  something  very  close 
to  this,  throwing  most  interesting  light  on 
the  writing  character  of  these  collections. 
[ii8] 


TYPES 

The  collections  formed  very  soon  after  the 
invention  of  phonetic  handwriting  in  par- 
ticular give  very  clean-cut  illustrations  of 
the  meaning  of  many  classes  of  these 
temple  deposits  of  symbolic  and  mne- 
monic objects,  and  this  in  turn  casts  light 
on  the  primitive  object  collections  of  the 
shaman  and  the  tribal  story  teller. 

To  begin  with,  a  list  of  the  objects 
found  in  the  Hopi  North  American  In- 
dian shrines,  as  given  by  J.  W.  Fewkes, 
will  illustrate  the  fact  of  the  varied  con- 
tents of  aboriginal  shrines:  "The  tem- 
porary offerings  in  shrines  are  prayer 
meal  and  pollen,  sticks,  clay  effigies  of 
small  animals,  miniature  bowls  and  vases 
of  water,  small  bows  and  arrows,  small 
dolls,  turquoise,  shells,  and  other  objects." 
"Among  the  permanent  objects  not  offer- 
ings .  .  .  human  or  animal  images  of 
wood  and  stone,  concretionary  or  botryoi- 
dal  stones,  carved  stone  slabs,  and  fossil 
shells"  (Hodge). 

[119] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

The  historical  votive  offering  collec- 
tions of  Greece,  Crete,  Egypt,  and  Baby- 
lonia extend  over  long  periods,  and  the 
objects  recovered  from  them  include  hun- 
dreds of  thousands  of  record  objects. 
These  include,  as  in  the  case  of  the  Hopi 
shrines,  a  great  many  objects  not  intended 
as  offerings  at  all.  The  temple  treasuries, 
even  in  very  early  times,  were  used  as  a 
sort  of  general  safety  deposit  vault,  the 
protection  consisting  not  only  in  the 
watchfulness  of  the  priest  but  the  tabu,  or 
curse  laid  upon  those  who  should  even  ap- 
proach the  objects,  and  the  general  belief 
that  they  were  in  fact  under  the  protec- 
tion of  the  god  who  would  punish  theft. 
Such  objects  might  be  taken  again  by  the 
owner,  as  is  shown  in  the  case  of  the 
Greek  temple  treasuries,  or  they  were 
things  held  in  trust  by  the  priests  for  the 
benefit  of  widows  and  orphans  as  was  the 
case  of  the  Jewish  temple.  Moreover, 
even  the  record  objects  were  by  no  means 
[120] 


TYPES 

confined  to  records  of  the  fact,  the  nature, 
and  the  extent  of  the  offerings  made,  al- 
though a  great  f>ortion  of  them  were 
precisely  for  this  record  purpose.  Increas- 
ingly, and  at  last  very  extensively,  they 
included  records  of  events  of  war,  hunt- 
ing, and  in  later  times  of  the  public  games. 
They  were  in  the  Greek  temples  very  ex- 
tensively biographical  or  genealogical  and 
tended  to  be  so  progressively.  Indeed 
vast  quantities  of  tablets  "laid  up"  in  the 
temples  had  no  connection  with  sacrifice 
at  all  but  were  merely  records  deposited 
as  one  might  deposit  family  manuscripts 
or  present  a  printed  autobiography  to  a 
public  library.  The  votive  collection  was 
simply  a  public  reference  library  as  dis- 
tinguished from  political  archives  or 
school  libraries  for  instruction  or  learning. 
The  more  strictly  votive  records  were 
themselves  of  great  variety.  They  in- 
clude object  records,  sample  records, 
models,    pictures,    symbol    records,    and 

[121] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

phonetic  inscription  records.  But,  what- 
ever the  form,  the  underlying  idea  or 
motive  is  the  same,  they  are  records  of  of- 
ferings made,  whether  those  offerings  are 
sacrifice  or  thank  offerings.  The  treas- 
ury of  the  Greek  temple  was  sometimes  a 
separate  building  by  itself  filled  with  these 
records.  The  Jewish  temple  had  separate 
treasuries  for  war  trophies  and  for  pther 
votive  offerings.  Primarily,  of  course, 
these  treasuries  were  in  fact  intended  for 
the  actual  objects — the  tithe  of  the  first 
fruits,  the  tithe  of  the  spoils  taken  in  war, 
and  the  animals  intended  for  sacrifice, 
but  as  these  were  intended  for  consump- 
tion, the  records  took  their  place  and  in 
later  times  increasingly  images  and  even 
verbal  statements  were  used  as  offerings 
in  place  of  real  objects,  forming,  so  to 
speak,  a  collection  of  fiction  or  perhaps 
better,  the  actual  records  of  real  spiritual 
acts  performed,  signifying  petition,  sacri- 
fice, thanksgiving,  etc.  of  the  worshiper. 

[122] 


TYPES 

The  innumerable  tables  with  record  of 
cattle  in  the  great  cattle  pens  of  the 
Babylonian  temples,  although  perhaps  not 
to  be  described  themselves  as  "votive  of- 
ferings", actually  corresf>ond  to  the  later 
practice,  where  the  votive  offering  is  kept 
as  records  of  offerings,  and  correspond 
very  closely  in  the  case  of  war  trophies, 
where  it  often  happened  that  a  part  was 
dedicated  and  the  rest  sold  or  melted  down 
and  made  into  valuable  objects  which  in 
turn  might,  in  case  of  need,  be  converted 
into  cash  and  have  an  image  or  some  other 
record  substitute. 

After  the  war  trophies  and  perhaps  be- 
fore them,  the  most  significant  class  of  of- 
ferings was  that  of  the  first  fruits  which 
ranged  through  the  whole  field  of  human 
production  from  the  fruit  of  mines,  fields, 
orchards,  vineyards,  hunting,  fisheries, 
flocks,  up  through  the  trades  of  fuller, 
potter,  baker,  tanner,  shipwright,  wash- 
woman, butcher,  cook,  basket-maker,  shoe- 

[123] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

maker,  and  so  on  up  to  professional  men, 
recorders  and  the  first  copy  of  literary 
works.  When  possible  the  offering  might 
be  and  was  originally  in  kind,  but  when 
not,  as  in  the  case  of  the  physician  or  the 
recorder,  it  would  be  in  the  shape  of 
money  or,  more  likely  in  the  case  of  the 
physician,  an  image  in  some  valuable  sub- 
stance of  the  particular  operation  or  dis- 
ease for  which  fee  was  received  (e.g.  the 
golden  tumors  which  the  Philistines  sent 
to  the  Jewish  shrine).  These  were  ex- 
tremely common  as  the  free-will  offerings 
or  vow  payments  among  those  who  had 
been  healed.  When  money  began  to  take 
the  place  of  barter  the  replacing  of  ob- 
jects by  their  money  value  with  registry 
of  same  in  the  books  of  the  temple  grew 
with  it  and  became  the  tithe-tax  still  fa- 
miliar in  the  English  language  and 
English  society. 

An  extremely  interesting  library  aspect 
of  these  (votive)  collections  is  the  actual 
[124I 


TYPES 

phonetically  written  books  which  were 
laid  up.  These  can  be  best  illustrated 
from  the  Greek  collections  of  books  dedi- 
cated, but  have  their  precise  technical 
equivalent  in  the  books  which  Joshua, 
Samuel,  or  Moses  "laid  up"  before  Je- 
hovah, and  indeed  the  technical  term  is 
precisely  that  for  putting  a  book  into  a 
library  or  a  document  into  the  archives. 
The  Greek  collections  included  literary 
works,  prize  poems,  hymns  to  Dionysus, 
Apollo,  Asclepius,  etc.  These  may  have 
been  of  a  strictly  votive  character,  and  this 
is  true  of  many  other  works  by  Pindar, 
Hesiod,  Heraclitus,  Aristomache,  Aris- 
totle, Agathias,  Alcaeus,  and  Solon  which 
may  perhaps  be  first  fruits.  This  might 
also  be  true,  of  course,  of  the  astronomy 
of  Eudoxus,  the  astronomical  table  of 
Onopides,  the  calculations  of  Xenocrates 
and  the  log  book  of  Hanno.  But  these  at 
least  point  to  very  varied  contents  of  these 
"votive"  libraries.    These  examples  above 

[125] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

mentioned  were  on  varied  materials  as 
well,  including  at  least  lead,  gold,  marble, 
and  bronze,  apparently,  as  well  as  papyrus 
or  leather.  Some  of  the  works  were  in 
shorthand.  While  it  is  not  easy  to  con- 
ceive of  literary  works  as  first  fruits  in 
the  earlier  period  of  the  primitive  writing 
and  for  the  reason  that  such  forms  are 
themselves  a  later  development,  many  of 
the  mnemonic  objects  preserved  in  primi- 
tive collections  certainly  stand  for  prayers 
and  hymns  as  well  as  narrative  records 
and  in  the  collections  of  sacred  liturgical 
objects  these  represented  set  liturgical 
forms  of  words  or  dramatic  procedures 
which  are  books  in  quite  a  developed 
sense. 

A  curiously  interesting  suggestion 
which  seems  to  throw  light  on  the  literary 
meaning  of  votive  objects  is  the  statement 
by  Miss  Harrison  that  the  sacred  tokens 
of  Zeus  as  god  of  the  storeroom  were 
symbols,  not  statues,  and  probably  sacred 
[126] 


TYPES 

tokens  such  as  those  carried  in  chests  at 
the  sacred  processions, — magic  spells  in 
short,  kept  in  a  jar  for  the  safeguarding 
of  the  storeroom.  The  farther  identifica- 
tion of  these  with  the  ambrosia  and  with 
Zeus  himself  seems  to  make  rather  clear 
that  many  of  the  collections  of  sacred  em- 
blems are  verbal  documents.  The  relation 
of  this  to  what  was  before  said  of  the 
keeping  of  books  in  jars  is  obvious,  and 
the  fact  is  suggested  that  many  of  the  so- 
called  collections  of  votive  ofiferings  are 
of  this  character,  that  is,  mnemonic  ob- 
jects, perhaps  actual  collections  of  verbal 
forms. 

Libraries  for  the  dead  are  most  famil- 
iar and  most  highly  developed  in  the 
Egyptian  burial  customs.  From  a  very 
early  date  various  books,  generally  known 
in  their  collected  state  now  as  chapters  of 
the  Book  of  the  Dead,  were  always  buried 
with  the  important  dead.  Another  fa- 
mous example  of  this  burial  of  phonetic 

[127] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

books  with  the  dead  is  found  in  the  so- 
called  Orphic  or  Petalian  gold  tablets, 
found  at  various  points  from  Asia  Minor 
to  Italy.  The  most  interesting  class,  how- 
ever, from  our  point  of  view  is  the  large 
quantities  of  quipus  which  have  been 
found  in  the  Peruvian  graves. 

All  these  libraries  should  be  clearly  dis- 
tinguished from  other  collections  of 
buried  books,  such  as  those  which  the 
Jews  made  of  worn  and  mutilated  books. 
They  are  distinctly  collections  made  for 
the  use  of  the  dead.  Some  of  them  are 
for  use  during  the  journey  to  the  Elysian 
fields,  the  garden  of  Aalu,  or  the  happy 
hunting  grounds,  some  apparently  rather 
for  use  after  reaching  them.  The  Egyp- 
tian books  are  rather  clearly  associated 
with  the  idea  of  the  amulets  and  the  other 
written  charms,  though  on  a  higher  plane. 
The  idea  seems  to  have  been  that  the  de- 
ceased should  learn  them  by  heart  and  re- 
cite them  at  various  points  as  passwords 
[128] 


TYPES 

for  admission  to  the  various  gates  or  to 
pass  various  defenders  of  paradise.  The 
Petalian  tablets  are  precisely  of  the  same 
character.  In  the  case  of  the  quipus,  and 
of  symbolic  emblems  generally,  the  anal- 
ogy is  perhaps  rather  to  be  found  in  the 
Egyptian  models  of  tools  and  servants, 
and  the  hunting  weapons  buried  with  the 
North  American  Indians,  also  children's 
playthings  everywhere,  where  the  point 
seems  to  be  to  supply  the  dead  with  their 
customary  instruments  for  use  after  they 
have  arrived  in  paradise. 

Other  objects  of  dress,  ornament,  etc., 
found  in  graves,  strongly  suggest  the 
similar  collection  during  life,  where  cloth- 
ing and  ornament  is  personal  record  of 
events  or  achievements  in  a  man's  life. 
Probably  not  all  grave  collections  include 
the  same  elements,  but  it  seems  likely  that 
all  three  elements  of  personal  record, 
guides  to  paradise,  and  libraries  for  para- 
dise, are  to  be  recognized  at  one  point  or 

another. 

[129] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

The  quipus  form  the  clearest  example, 
and  the  long  history  of  knot  amulets  sug- 
gests that  they  may  have  been  intended 
primarily  to  play  precisely  the  same  part 
that  the  various  parts  or  chapters  of  the 
Book  of  the  Dead  played.  The  equally 
extensive  use,  however,  of  knots  for  rec- 
ords or  reminders,  as  in  the  mnemonic 
fringes,  allows  the  possibility  of  the  indi- 
vidual personal  record,  and  there  is,  of 
course,  also  the  possibility  that  the  graves 
in  which  they  were  found  were  the  graves 
of  tribal  recorders  or  reciters  who  carried 
with  them  the  implements  of  their  trade 
in  the  same  spirit  that  the  hunting 
weapons  were  carried,  or,  on  the  other 
hand,  in  the  spirit  of  the  suicide  of  a 
king's  servants  that  they  might  serve  him 
in  the  other  world,  and  of  the  Ushabtiu 
substitutes  for  this.  These  models  of  ser- 
vants, boats,  war  implements,  and  the  like, 
in  graves  seem  to  be  precisely  analogous 
to  the  miniatures  substituted  for  actual 
objects  in  votive  offerings. 
[130] 


TYPES 

Burial  with  the  dead  of  a  person's  fa- 
vorite belongings  has  also  to  be  reckoned 
with  in  interpreting  these  collections. 
Sometimes  all  a  man's  favorite  posses- 
sions were  buried  with  him,  and  it  not  in- 
frequently happens  in  modem  civilized 
times  that  a  person  has  a  favorite  orna- 
ment or  possession  buried  with  him.  It 
was  only  yesterday  that  a  man  provided 
for  having  his  cremated  body  sunk  in  his 
favorite  yacht. 


[131] 


§   1 8.  Contents  of  primitive  libraries 

The  various  kinds  of  documents  in  the 
several  sorts  of  primitive  writing  found 
in  the  different  species  of  collections  have 
been  indicated  under  the  various  headings. 
It  is  worth  while  however  to  gather  these 
up  together  a  little  and  especially  in  view 
of  the  question  of  actual  origin. 

It  has  been  noted  that  collections  of 
quipu,  message  sticks,  fetishes,  personal 
ornaments,  skin  calendars,  totems,  votive 
objects  and  other  pictorial  or  mnemonic 
records  in  temples,  graves,  medicine 
tents,  private  wigwams,  etc.,  include,  in 
pre-phonetic  times,  records  of  personal 
exploits  and  events  in  personal  history, 
family  histories,  and  tribal  histories, 
hymns,  prayers,  amulets,  financial  ac- 
counts, and  economic  records  of  various 

[132] 


CONTENTS 

sorts,  annual  registers,  contracts,  astron- 
omical observations,  etc. 

All  this  has  its  bearing  on  the  actual 
origin  of  libraries.  Messrs.  Tedder  and 
Brown  in  their  excellent  article  in  the 
latest  edition  of  the  Encyclopaedia  Britan- 
nica  say  that  "the  earliest  use  to  which 
the  invention  of  inscribed  or  written  signs 
was  put  was  probably  to  record  import- 
ant religious  and  political  transactions". 
Now  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  conscious 
record  of  events  and  transactions  selected 
as  important  for  the  knowledge  of  pos- 
terity, or  even,  what  was  probably  a  much 
earlier  matter,  for  evidence  of  contract  or 
practical  memorandum,  represents  a 
rather  late  stage  in  the  evolution  of  rec- 
ord. It  is  likely  that  there  were  many 
record  collections  before  this  stage  was 
reached,  trophy,  votive,  etc.,  object  rec- 
ords and  economic  records  of  various 
sorts. 

In  point  of  fact  as  King  remarks  of  the 

[133] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

earliest  Sumerian  records,  a  large  quan- 
tity of  the  earliest  records  are  land  deeds, 
and  any  one  who  looks  over  the  cunei- 
form documents  will  be  impressed  with 
the  fact  that  an  enormously  large  pro- 
portion of  the  existing  documents  of  the 
early  historical  period  are  contracts  or 
lists  of  cattle  or,  as  in  the  Cretan  excava- 
tion, labels,  or  lists  of  arrows  and  other 
materials  laid  up  in  storehouses.  Among 
Egyptian  documents  too,  the  annals  of  the 
Palermo  stone,  the  earliest  systematic  an- 
nals of  Egypt,  which  incorporate  earlier 
documents  from  its  own  time  (say  2700 
B.C.)  to  six  or  seven  centuries  farther 
back,  are  to  a  considerable  extent  filled 
with  memoranda  of  census  lists  of  cattle 
taken  and  other  lists  of  possessions.  It 
has  already  been  noticed  that  among  the 
commonest  earliest  uses  of  notch,  knot 
and  pebble  systems  was  use  for  the  record 
of  cattle  or  other  numerical  lists  of 
possessions. 

[134] 


CONTENTS 

It  would  be  jumping  at  conclusions  to 
say  that  the  conventional  sign  attached 
to  or  accompanying  the  pre-historic  ani- 
mal paintings  of  the  caves  were  numbers. 
They  may  quite  likely  be  ownership 
marks.  It  is  a  curious  fact,  which  has 
recently  been  commented  on,  that  these 
animal  paintings  are  of  domestic  animals 
and  if  so  the  ownership  marks  themselves 
would  be  pictures  of  the  marks  actually 
branded  upon  the  animals  just  as  such 
marks  are  still  branded  on  cattle  on  the 
plains  and  by  New  England  farmers  on 
their  sheep.  The  fact  that  the  tendency 
seems  to  be  to  regard  the  contents  of  these 
caves  as  religious,  and  the  use  of  the 
caves  as  for  religious  purposes,  suggests 
an  analogy  with  votive  offerings.  If  the 
marks  are  in  fact  numbers,  the  combina- 
tion of  figure  and  number  suggests  at 
once  the  innumerable  lists  of  animals  in 
the  Babylonian  temple  records.  Owner- 
ship marks  themselves  are,  of  course,  not 

[1351 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

records  of  events  but  economic  records 
and  are  very  common  before  the  use  of 
phonetic  writing.  One  very  large  class  of 
these  is  the  pottery  mark  which  was  first 
applied  apparently  by  the  man  who  made 
them  for  himself  as  an  ownership  mark 
and  then,  as  one  became  more  skilled  in 
one  thing  and  another  and  barter  began, 
it  passed  into  the  trade-mark  of  manufac- 
turers which  has  survived  in  the  modern 
trade-mark  system. 

It  does  not,  of  course,  follow  that  the 
earliest  documents  were  not  also  religious 
as  well  as  business  and  political,  or  even 
religious  as  distinguished  from  the  po- 
litical. Actual  evidence,  so  far  as  it  goes, 
seems  to  point  to  trophy  records  and 
votive  records, — and  votive  records  of 
first  fruits  or  other  useful  or  valuable  ob- 
jects "laid  up"  are  economic  records,  but 
the  parallel  evidence  as  to  priest  king,  the 
evidence  as  to  religious  sanction  for  the 
protection  of  objects,  the  hypothesis  of 
[136] 


CONTENTS 

priestly  guidance  in  the  tribal  meal  for 
fair  apportionment  of  spoils,  etc.,  point  to 
religious  supervision  of  economic  matters. 
In  the  savage  state  the  rule  is  that  when 
food  is  scanty  the  strong  eat  what  they 
want  and  the  weak  starve — the  rule  of 
the  wolf  pack.  The  germ  of  all  social 
order  is  perhaps  the  rule  that  the  weak 
also  shall  share  in  limited  food.  Founded 
possibly  in  selfishness — the  will  to  keep 
the  weak  alive  for  selfish  reasons,  it  in- 
volves at  least  power  of  individual  self- 
control,  the  considering  of  remoter  ends 
and  a  certain  social-consciousness.  The 
right  sharing  of  food  supply  requires  a 
strong  hand  under  savage  conditions  and 
every  possible  sanction  of  authority.  It 
was  quite  natural  therefore  that  the  com- 
mon meal  "before  God"  which  plays  such 
a  large  part  in  primitive  custom  should 
grow  up — and  equally  natural  that  it 
should  be  the  symbol  of  peace.  The 
priest,  standing  for  God,  divided  the  of- 

[137] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

fering' — no  doubt  in  the  beginning  the 
whole  food  supply — and  perhaps  "kept" 
the  natural  relics  of  the  feast  in  the  way 
of  skins  and  bones. 

Provisionally  therefore  one  may  ven- 
ture the  hypothesis  that  the  actual  begin- 
nings of  record  collections  were  economic 
under  religious  direction, — and  are  to  be 
found  in  the  remains  of  tribal  feasts  "be- 
fore God"  although  it  may  be  fair  to  say 
that  the  rudiments  of  the  matter  already 
existed  when  the  strong  hand  of  the  head 
of  the  family  or  tribe  insisted  on  a  fair 
distribution  of  food.  Specht  (p.  ii) 
speaks  of  the  bones  of  sacrifices  as  "the 
oldest  approaches  to  a  sort  of  writing", 
and  of  course,  the  bones  on  the  family 
plates,  so  to  si>eak,  were  as  truly  records 
of  the  parts  assigned  to  them,  so  far  as 
they  went  (and  if  their  portions  had 
bones)  as  the  bones  of  sacrifices!  But 
then  there  is  of  course  the  farther  ques- 
tion :     Did  the  first  savage  who  denied 

[138] 


CONTENTS 

himself  for  the  sake  of  one  of  the  weak 
not  have  the  reHgious  motive,  and  did  not 
the  first  man  who  forced  a  tribe  of  his 
fellows  to  do  the  same,  need  to  use  the 
religious  sanction  and  invoke  the  fear  of 
God  as  well  as  of  his  own  right  arm? 
And  then,  equally  of  course,  there  is  the 
farther  question  whether  the  first  man 
was  a  savage  at  all. 

In  the  golden  age  before  the  mild  and 
camiverous  Abel,  before  even  his  fruit- 
iverous  and  murderous  older  brother,  be- 
fore the  Fall  when  all  were  still  fruit 
eaters  and  fruit  eaters  only,  the  tabu  was 
— religious  prohibition  and  religious  sanc- 
tion. And  that  tabu  was  on  the  apples 
of  Iduna,  the  fruit  of  the  tree  of  knowl- 
edge between  good  and  evil,  which  springs 
from  the  fountains  of  memory  and  reflec- 
tion,— the  golden  apples  of  strife  which 
some  say  give  immortality,  some  death. 
What  is  this  tree  whose  fruit  is  tangible 
knowledge,   the   food   of   the   gods   and 

[  139] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

which  was  in  the  beginning  with  the  first 
man,  but  a  library,  and  what  did  those 
old  philosophizers  mean  by  what  they  set 
down  about  the  first  man  and  the  way 
they  put  it  ?  Did  they  mean  that  what  is 
food  for  one  is  poison  for  another  or 
simply  that  to  break  tabu  spells  death 
whether  it  is  body  food  tabu  or  mind 
food  tabu?  Truth  to  tell  the  germ  of 
the  library  is  as  early  as  man's  mind — at 
least. 

Back  to  this  point,  the  beginning  of 
man,  we  have  actual  literary  "authority" 
in  the  person  of  Specht  at  least,  and 
nearly  back  to  this  point  we  have  good 
archaeological  sources  for  our  collections 
of  written  records.  There  is,  however,  no 
authority  in  literature  or  in  the  sources, 
so  far  as  this  lecturer  knows,  for  carrying 
conjecture  back  into  the  territory  of  the 
pithecanthropos,  who,  however,  must 
have  made  and  left  similar  involuntary 
records  of  his  gastronomic  activities,  but 

[140I 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

who  presumably  never  observed  them  or 
appointed  them  for  memorial  purposes. 


[141I 


§   19-  The    administration    of    primitive 
libraries 

The  question  of  where  and  by  whom 
and  how  books  were  kept  and  made  ready 
for  users  is  not  one  that  has  been  very 
much  discussed  although  the  questions 
who  were  the  librarians  and  where  were 
the  books  kept  has  been  more  or  less  im- 
plied in  the  discussions  of  temple  versus 
secular  collections.  Mr.  Tedder's  dictum 
that  "these  records  would  naturally  be 
preserved  in  sacred  places,  and  accord- 
ingly the  earliest  libraries  of  the  world 
were  probably  temples  and  the  earliest  li- 
brarians priests"  is  modified  and  perhaps 
at  the  same  time  confirmed  by  the  history 
of  pre-phonetic  libraries.  It  is  true  that 
in  primitive  tribes  the  medicine  man  is 
generally  a  keeper  of  records,  but  it  is 

[  142] 


ADMINISTRATION 

true  also  that  among  the  Mexican  Indians 
certainly,  and  pretty  clearly  among  North 
American  Indian  tribes  and  in  many  Afri- 
can tribes,  the  shaman  or  medicine  man  is 
not  the  only  keeper  of  records.  It  is  true 
also  that  in  the  early  Egyptian  practice 
the  priests  were  the  keepers  of  the  books 
whether  it  was  in  the  temple,  archives  or 
the  palace  archives,  but  even  here  it 
seems  to  be  the  fact  that  there  were  mili- 
tary records,  department  records,  and  lo- 
cal administrative  records  in  the  different 
nomes  kept  by  scribes  who  were  not 
priests. 

The  keeping  of  records  must  in  fact 
have  begun  before  there  was  any  special 
place,  even  the  simplest  hut  or  medicine 
wigwam  or  cave,  set  apart  for  distinct- 
ively religious  purposes,  although  the 
setting  apart  of  such  places  is  apparently 
as  old  as  the  caves  of  the  Stone  Age. 
With  these  qualifications,  the  history  of 
votive    offerings    tends    to   confirm    the 

[143] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

Statement  that  the  earliest  public  or  tribal 
libraries  were  religious  and  the  corre- 
sponding librarians  the  priests. 

In  very  early  times,  and  in  much  later 
times  among  primitive  peoples,  even  the 
art  of  writing  itself  was  often  kept  as  a 
secret  mystery  in  the  custody  of  priests. 
The  name  "hieroglyphics"  points  in  this 
same  direction,  and  the  temple  collections 
of  sacred  books,  the  so-called  books  of 
Thoth  and  books  of  Hermes,  point  in  the 
same  direction.  In  general,  however,  this 
monopoly  of  letters  seems  rather  to  have 
been  a  deliberate  assumption  by  the 
priests,  as  it  is  sometimes  assumed  by 
savage  royalty,  rather  than  the  original 
situation.  It  applies,  of  course,  rather  to 
newly  devised  kinds  of  symbols,  such  as 
the  vast  number  of  systems  of  secret  writ- 
ing which  have  been  evolved  in  all  ages, 
than  to  the  ordinary  current  record 
methods.  That  some  of  the  earliest  li- 
braries were  secret  libraries,  however,  is 

[144] 


ADMINISTRATION 

an  interesting  fact,  and  one  which  may 
throw  light  on  the  mysterious  collections 
of  shrines  and  portable  collections  of  ob- 
jects in  the  liturgical  processions  in 
Egypt. 

The  methods  used  by  these  priest  li- 
brarians for  keeping  and  using  the  books 
form  in  themselves  an  interesting  and  lit- 
tle studied  subject  of  very  considerable 
extent 

The  different  kinds  of  writing  required 
different  sorts  of  receptacles.  The  book 
chest  or  bookcase,  from  which  has  come 
through  the  Greek  the  common  word  for 
library  in  languages  other  than  English, 
was  the  most  universal  and  natural  way 
of  keeping  almost  every  kind  of  tangible 
record.  The  wooden  chests  and  clay 
chests  of  the  earliest  historical  periods 
must  have  extended  well  back  into  the 
pre-phonetic  period  and  have  also  been 
found  among  primitive  and  semi-civilized 
peoples.    They  can  obviously  be  used  for 

[145] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

quipus,  message  sticks,  or  almost  any- 
portable  document.  The  same  is  true  of 
the  clay  jar  so  often  used  in  the  earliest 
historical  period.  In  the  case  of  wander- 
ing tribes,  however,  less  rigid  or  fragile 
materials  are  certainly  better,  and  the 
book  pouch  was,  therefore,  in  very  early, 
and  probably  much  earlier  use  than  either 
boxes  or  jars.  The  skin  pouch,  like  the 
skin  water  jar,  is  naturally  suggested  and 
easily  made.  This  early  form  survives 
in  the  medicine  bag,  the  lawyer's  green 
bag,  and  the  schoolboy's  bag  as  well  as  in 
mail  pouches  for  post-office  use. 

The  use  of  basketry  work  and  perhaps 
other  textile  work  as  bookcase  also  cer- 
tainly extended  back  into  pre-phonetic 
times  and  is  represented  in  primitive 
usage. 

It  is  not  to  be  supposed,  of  course,  that 

in  these  primitive  times  there  were  often 

separate    buildings,    such    as    the    later 

Greek  treasuries,  or  even  separate  rooms 

[146] 


ADMINISTRATION 

as  in  the  Egyptian  temples,  and  the 
archives  at  Boghaz  Keuei  and  elsewhere, 
although  separate  huts  for  these  and  es- 
pecially for  "collections  of  liturgical  ob- 
jects" would  perhaps  be  almost  the  first 
use  for  covered  rooms,  while  sacrificing 
was  still  conducted  in  the  open  air. 

Something  like  a  pouch  or  wallet  must 
have  been  used  for  the  marked  pebbles 
of  the  Stone  Age  and  for  pebble  counting 
generally  before  the  grooves  and  rods  of 
the  abacus  were  invented. 

The  method  of  keeping  and  displaying 
the  books  in  the  boxes,  pouches,  rooms  or 
buildings,  varied  of  course  according  to 
the  nature  of  the  document.  In  the  mod- 
em library  there  is  a  great  difference 
between  the  machinery  necessary  to  keep 
and  display  folded  documents,  rolled 
documents,  and  ordinary  bound  books. 
The  pouch  may  have  had  compartments 
like  a  modern  purse.  Basketry,  clay  and 
wood  cases  did  have  compartments,  one 

[147] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

for   each    roll,    in    quite    early    papyrus 
days. 

In  some  of  the  late  Babylonian  libra- 
ries the  clay  tablets  were  evidently  dis- 
played on  shelves  but  they  were  more 
commonly  kept  in  clay  boxes  or  jars,  ala- 
baster boxes,  and  the  like,  after  the  gen- 
eral fashion  of  the  treasuries  in  earlier 
times  and  until  the  quantity  became  great. 
Twig  records  were  tied  together  in 
bundles,  and  the  stringing  together  of 
records  was  one  of  the  earliest  and  most 
extensively  used  methods.  It  may  per- 
haps be  said  that  it  was  the  typical  method 
of  the  earliest  records.  It  is  found  in  the 
stringing  together  of  trophy  objects  for 
wearing  on  the  person — necklaces,  girdles, 
and  draped  strings  of  various  trophies. 
It  is  found  also  early  in  the  history  of 
the  abacus  where  the  perforated  pebbles 
or  beads  were  strung  on  different  rods 
set  in  the  ground,  and  it  is  of  course 
found  in  the  developed  abacus.  The  per- 
[148] 


ADMINISTRATION 

forations  of  tablets,  bearing  the  year 
marks,  among  the  objects  from  the  ear- 
liest dynasties  at  Abydos,  suggest  a 
stringing  together  of  these  annual  records, 
although  it  is  of  course  possible  that  these 
are  labels  and  the  perforations  used  to 
attach  them  to  boxes.  The  analogy  with 
annual  records  of  primitive  people,  how- 
ever, suggests  this  stringing  together. 

What  may  be  called  classification  of 
these  libraries  is  found  very  early.  It 
is  reflected  perhaps  in  the  early  distinction 
between  temple  and  palace  libraries,  and 
more  clearly  in  the  primitive  distinction 
between  shamans  and  secular  recorders. 
The  putting  of  like  kinds  of  works  in 
boxes  together,  medical  works,  etc.,  is 
found  as  early  as  270x3  B.C.  in  Egypt  and 
quite  early  in  Crete.  The  labels  of  Crete 
point  to  a  classification  of  objects  if  not 
of  object  records. 

When  collections  are  small  no  catalogu- 
ing is  necessary  excepting  in  the  libra- 

[  149] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

rian's  mind,  and  his  first  mnemonic  aid 
is  classification,  which  is  in  fact  a  sort  of 
cataloguing  and  takes  the  place  of  all 
other  cataloguing.  It  is  to  be  noted  that 
in  the  very  earliest  records  the  librarian 
goes  with  the  king  or  the  investigating 
committee  when  they  go  to  look  up  the 
records. 


[150] 


§  20.  The  beginnings  of  library  schools 

The  library  school  is  commonly  re- 
garded as,  and  is,  in  a  sense,  a  product 
of  the  last  century.  Library  schools  are, 
therefore,  still  a  new  thing.  It  may  not 
seem  so  to  you  who  had  not  been  born 
when  some  of  us  were  lecturing  at  that 
first  American  library  school  up  at  Co- 
lumbia University,  but  it  is  the  fact  that 
the  teachers  of  that  school  are  still  living 
and  teaching,  and  there  were  no  schools 
of  library  economy  strictly  speaking 
when  they  began.  The  well  fledged  li- 
brary school  as  an  avowed  school  and  in- 
dependent unit  is  a  product  of  this 
generation. 

Nevertheless  library  schools  too  have 
had  their  beginnings.  In  the  immediate 
past    schools    or    university    courses    of 

[151] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

palaeography  or  archival  science  have  been 
practically  library  schools.  In  European 
countries,  where  the  handling  of  docu- 
ments and  manuscripts  have  been  so  much 
the  more  difficult  share  of  the  problem 
that  library  economy  and  all  the  rest  has 
been  counted  negligible  and  has  in  fact 
been  neglected,  these  were  real  library 
schools,  in  that  they  were  chiefly  or  wholly 
intended  for  and  used  by  those  who  were 
intending  to  be  librarians.  They  taught 
in  fact  the  things  which  were  most  ex- 
pected of  the  librarians,  just  as  the  mod- 
ern schools,  in  teaching  almost  exclusively 
business  and  administrative  methods, 
teach  the  things  which  the  moderns  ex- 
pect of  their  librarians.  They  were  and 
are,  therefore,  very  one-sided  library 
schools,  lopsided  on  the  science  side,  and 
yet  perhaps  not  more  lopsided  than  our 
own  schools  are  on  the  side  of  library 
economy. 

But  the  beginnings  of  library  schools 

[152] 


LIBRARY  SCHOOLS 

may  be  found  farther  back  still  in  the 
schools  of  the  Scriptoria  of  the  middle 
ages,  where  librarians  made  as  well  as 
kept  their  books,  and  in  the  temple  schools 
of  Greece  and  Egypt,  where  men  were 
trained  to  all  sorts  of  professions,  includ- 
ing the  keeping  of  books.  Such  schools 
are  alleged  in  Babylonia  as  early  as  3200 
B.C.,  and  more  primitive  still  must  be 
counted  the  schools  for  the  training  in 
memorizing  of  ancient  India.  That  some 
analogies  to  this  training  in  the  keeping 
of  books  existed  in  the  collections  of  mne- 
monic books  is  not  merely  inferred  in 
general  but  found  in  the  alleged  training 
of  keepers  of  quipus  in  the  use  and  pub- 
lication of  these  records.  The  same  is 
possibly  true  in  some  of  the  initiation 
ceremonies  of  primitive  tribes  where  the 
young  men  are  presumably  taught  the  use 
of  message  sticks,  secret  languages,  and 
the  like.  It  may  fairly  be  said  that  these 
are  remote  in  nature  as  well  as  in  time, 
[153] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

and  yet  they  are  as  truly  the  predecessors 
of  the  library  schools  of  to-day,  as  these 
of  to-day  are  of  the  library  schools  of 
to-morrow,  which  are  likely  to  differ  very 
considerably  from  those  of  to-day. 

It  does  not  take  much  of  a  prophet  to 
foresee  a  radical  development  in  some  of 
our  American  library  schools  within  a 
very  few  years.  When  for  example,  the 
Columbia  Library  school  was  starting, 
manuscripts  were  so  few  in  this  country 
that  their  science  and  economy  was  a 
negligible  element  in  instruction — and  as 
for  archives,  we  had  plenty  of  documents 
but  the  very  name  archive,  with  what  it 
connotes,  was  foreign  and  almost  un- 
known in  America.  Now  there  are  many 
well  recognized  archives  and  some  of  our 
collections  of  ancient  manuscripts  are 
numbered  by  the  thousands.  Many  of 
you  will  probably  live  to  see  more  than 
one  library  school  equipped  with  full  de- 
partments for  instruction  in  palaeography 

[154] 


LIBRARY  SCHOOLS 

and  archival  science,  with  special  curri- 
cula for  each  distinguished  from  the  gen- 
eral course  in  library  economy.  Possibly 
by  that  time  there  will  also  be  depart- 
ments of  cartography,  engraving  and 
numismatics,  each  with  its  corps  of  in- 
structors. In  these  respects  it  was  some- 
thing of  a  pity  that  the  library  school 
went  out  of  the  university,  but  on  the 
whole  it  may  be  doubted  if  it  would  have 
ever  had  the  great  expansion  or  ever  have 
done  the  great  work  that  it  has  done  for 
popular  education  if  it  had  stayed  in  the 
university.  In  several  very  fundamental 
respects  certainly  this  New  York  Public 
Library  is  a  far  better  environment  for 
developing  a  university  of  librarianship 
than  any  university  of  general  studies. 


[1551 


§  21.  The  beginnings  of  library  research 

What  we  have  been  saying  to-day  is 
only  the  rough  blocking  out  of  a  subject 
for  which  anthropology  and  the  excava- 
tions in  the  eastern  Mediterranean  region 
have  furnished  and  are  furnishing  an 
enormous  amount  of  source  material,  as 
yet  wholly  unexplored  for  library  mat- 
ters. A  small  part  of  the  material  has 
indeed  been  roughly  explored  and  has 
yielded  rich  results  in  fields  where  there 
was  absolutely  nothing  known  before, 
but  the  unexplored  matter  is  large  and  in- 
creasing rapidly  every  day.  Library  re- 
search it  may  fairly  be  said  is  itself  in  its 
beginnings,  and  American  research  in  li- 
braries for  the  older  periods  hardly  yet 
begun.  Of  course,  as  we  know  Aristotle 
had  some  faint  notion  of  anthropological 

[156] 


LIBRARY  RESEARCH 

methods  and  all  the  mythologizing  people 
were,  as  is  very  thoroughly  recognized 
now,  pursuing  a  sort  of  scientific  research 
and  expressing  and  thinking  in  these 
figures  of  speech.  In  this  point  of  view 
the  myths  as  to  Hermes  and  Thoth,  Se- 
shait  and  Minerva  were,  if  not  research, 
at  least  speculation  on  the  origins. 

Research,  however,  as  now  understood, 
is  the  product  of  modem  natural  science 
and  goes  hand  in  hand  with  the  doctrine 
of  evolution.  In  this  sense  there  has  al- 
ready been  much  good  research  work  in 
palaeography  and  other  branches  of  the 
book  sciences  in  European  countries.  In 
America  a  little  real  scientific  work  has 
been  done  in  palaeography,  more  in  the 
history  of  printing  and  a  trifle  in  some 
other  branches  of  library  science,  but  the 
total  is  small  and  little  or  none  of  it  di- 
rectly connected  with  the  library  school. 
It  is  likely,  however,  that  in  the  near 
future  many  of  the  library  schools  will 

[157] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

be  teaching  methods  of  research  and  giv- 
ing diplomas  which  require  some  real 
contribution.  Possibly  they  will  even 
have  recognized  departments  for  research. 
Of  this  movement  you  will  be  a  part  and 
the  character  of  the  development  will  be 
in  part,  possibly  in  large  part,  through 
what  you  think  and  do  and  become  during 
your  course  here.  Probably  we  have  as 
little  notion  of  what  record  keeping  will 
be  a  few  thousands  of  years  hence,  as  the 
inventor  of  the  knotted  cord  had  of  this 
library  school — and  yet  what  we  do  may 
perhaps  affect  the  state  of  things  then  as 
the  inventor  of  the  quipu,  the  alphabet, 
papyrus,  vellum,  printing,  the  photograph, 
phonograph,  or  any  of  the  great  inven- 
tions in  the  evolution  of  books  and  their 
keeping,  has  affected  the  present  state  of 
things. 


[158] 


§  22.    Bibliography 

The  best  first  source  for  a  general  idea 
of  primitive  libraries  is  the  readable  and 
well  illustrated  little  book  of  Edward 
Clodd  called  The  story  of  the  alphabet, 
(N.  Y.,  Appleton,  1912). 

With  this  may  be  put  the  still  briefer 
first  part  of  Dr.  Fritz  Specht's  Die  schrift 
(Berlin,  1909.    3rd  ed.). 

More  extensive  general  treatments  are 
found  in  Berger's  Histoire  (Paris,  1892), 
and  quite  exhaustively  in  Wuttke's  Die 
entstehung  der  schrift  (Leipzig,  1872), 
also  in  W.  J.  Hoffmann's  The  beginnings 
of  writing  (N.  Y.,  1895),  a  sketchy  but 
comprehensive  survey. 

For  the  definition  of  the  library  see 
Graesse  Schmidt  and  the  other  treatises 
on  library  science,  especially  the  older 
ones. 

[159] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

For  libraries  of  the  gods  see  the  various 
works  on  comparative  mythology  under 
the  topics  of  the  various  writing  gods, 
Hermes,  Thoth,  Odin,  etc.,  or  better,  since 
the  subject  has  not  been  very  much  worked 
up,  in  the  sources  The  Eddas,  The  Book 
of  the  Dead,  The  Avesta  and  for  the 
Indian  matters  Muir's  Sanskrit  texts. 

In  the  matter  of  antediluvian  libraries 
see  the  references  in  Schmidt  and 
Richardson,  but  especially  the  sources 
gathered  as  pseudepigraphic  literature  of 
the  Old  Testament  first  by  Fabricius  but 
now  to  be  had  in  more  modern  editions. 

For  animal,  plant  and  memory  libraries 
see  the  literature  of  so  called  "Compara- 
tive psychology"  given  in  admirable  de- 
tail annually  in  the  Psychological  index — 
looking  up  the  articles  on  inward  speech 
and  writing  as  well  as  on  memory. 

For  Preadamites  see  Winchell's  Pre- 
adamites  (Chicago,  1880),  and  the  works 
of  M'Causland. 

[160] 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

For  prehistoric  and  borderland  libra- 
ries generally  in  the  Mediterranean  region 
the  various  works  of  Mosso  may  be  con- 
sulted, especially  the  Dawn  of  Mediter- 
ranean civilization.  Ch.  2.  pp.  11-43  The 
Origin  of  Writing  and  still  better  Evans, 
Scrip  ta  Mi/noa  which  is  a  classic. 

For  prehistoric  western  Europe,  J. 
Dechelette's  Manuel  d'archeologie  prehis- 
torique  Celtique  et  Gallo-Romaine,  v.l., 
(Paris,  1908),  is  most  comprehensive  for 
a  first  survey  of  a  very  extensive  field. 

In  the  matter  of  primitive  tribes  Fro- 
benius'  Childhood  of  man  (Philadelphia, 
1909),  although  curiously  sketchy  and 
aggravatingly  brief,  seems  to  be  authori- 
tative enough,  and  certainly  gives  the  lay- 
man in  these  matters  a  good  idea  in  short 
space  of  the  anthropological  aspects  of 
the  subject. 

One  of  the  very  best  sources  easily 
accessible  to  all  for  getting  first  clear  im- 
pressions as  to  the  use  for  record  by 
[161] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

primitive  man  of  all  the  prephonetic  meth- 
ods of  record  is  F.  W.  Hodge,  Handbook 
of  American  Indians  North  of  Mexico. 
Smithsonian  Institute,  Bureau  of  Ameri- 
can Ethnology,  Bulletin  30,  Pt.  i  and  2. 
59th  Congress,  ist  Session,  House  Docu- 
ments V.  61  and  62,  Among  the  many- 
articles  some  of  the  best,  but  by  no  means 
the  only  useful  ones,  are  the  following: 
Adornment,  Calumet,  Color  symbolism. 
Dramatic  representations,  Engraving, 
Featherwork,  Fetish,  Hairdressing,  Knots, 
Labrets,  Mourning,  Ornament,  Painting, 
Piotographs,  Prayer  sticks,  Quillwork, 
Scalping,  Shrines,  Sign  language.  Signals, 
Tattooing,   Totem  poles.   Wampum. 

Add  to  this  for  the  African  tribes  Miss 
Kingsley's  West  Africa  and  Dennett's  At 
the  hack  of  the  Black  Man's  mind. 

For  the  enormous  literature  on  tattoo- 
ing see  the  list  of  hundreds  of  books  and 
articles  in  the  catalogue  of  the  Library  of 
the  U.  S.  Surgeon  General's  Office. 
[162] 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

For  the  quipu  an  article  by  L.  Leland 
Locke  on  The  ancient  Quipu,  a  Peruvian 
knot  record  is  g^ven  in  the  American  An- 
thropologist V.  14,  1912,  pp.  325-32,  This 
gives  a  modern  point  of  view,  has  excel- 
lent illustrations  and  its  author  promises 
a  bibliography  of  the  extensive  literature 
immediately. 

For  message  sticks  there  is  a  long  chap- 
ter with  illustrations  in  A.  W.  Howitt, 
The  native  tribes  of  South  East  Australia 
(London,  1904,  pp.  691-710). 

An  accessible  first  reference  for  pebble 
records  and  the  abacus  is  the  chapter  on 
systems  of  numeration  in  W.  W.  R.  Ball's 
History  of  mathematics  (London,  1888), 
pp.  1 14-19,  also,  and  perhaps  even  better, 
J.  Gow's  A  short  history  of  Greek  mathe- 
matics (Cambridge,  1884),  pp.  26-40. 
Cf .  also  article  on  the  abacus  in  the  Fauly- 
Wissowa  Encyclopedia. 

In  the  matter  of  the  votive  offerings  W. 
H.  D.   Rouse's  Greek   Votive  Offerings 

[163] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 

(Cambridge,  1902),  is  a  most  suggestive 
and  readable,  while  detailed  and  scholarly 
book. 

On  the  Orphic  tablets,  see  appendix  to 
Miss  Harrison's  Prolegomena  to  the  study 
of  Greek  religion  (Cambridge,  1903),  pp. 
660-74,  and  text  passim, — the  text  being 
one  of  the  classics  of  modern  comparative 
religion. 

The  end 


[164I 


INDEX 


A,  109. 

Aalu,  128. 

Abacus,    76,    98,    147, 

148,  163. 
Abbreviation,    83,    84, 

85,  109. 
Abbreviation  of  signs, 

81. 
Abel,  42,  139. 
Abydos,   149. 
Accumulation   of   ex- 
perience, 5' 
Actor,  67,  70. 
Adam,  26,   39-40,   41, 

42,  43,  46,  47. 
Adamite,  25. 
Administration         of 

primitive     libraries, 

142. 
Adornment,    162. 
Agathias,  125. 
Alcaeus,  125. 
Aleph,  56,  109. 
Alpha,  56,  109. 
Alphabetical    printed 

words      as      ideo- 


grams, 114. 

Alphabetical     writing, 
61. 

Ambrosia,  127. 

Ampere,  98. 

Amulets,  93-94.  "6, 
128,  132. 

Animal    libraries,    25, 
160. 

Annual  records,  149. 

Annual  registers,  132. 

Antediluvian       libra- 
ries, 25,  42,  160. 

Anthropology,  14,  117, 

156-57. 
Apocryphal     libraries, 

33. 
Archaeology,  22. 
Archival  science,  152. 
Archives,  18,   19,  125, 

147,  154,  155. 
Aristomache,  125. 
Aristotle,  125,  156. 
Articulate  speech,  61. 
Asclepius,  125. 
Assyrian,   iii. 


[165] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 


Astrology,  28. 
Astronomical     obser- 
vations, 133. 
Australians,  107. 
Babylonia,  28,  117. 
Babylonian     libraries, 

44,  148. 
Babylonian  temple 

records,  123,  135. 
Basketry,  147. 
Basketry  work,   146. 
Baskets,  74,  75. 
Battle  flags,  78. 
Beads,  97,  148. 
Berosus,  44,  47. 
Bibliography,  24. 
Bibliotheke,  15,  16. 
Bibliotheque,  16. 
Bidder,  98. 
Birch  bark,  113. 
Bird  tracks,  loi,  102. 
Blankets,  113. 
Body  painting,  104, 

los,  106, 
Bones  of  sacrifices, 

138. 
Book,  20. 
Book-jars,    127.      See 

also.  Jars. 
Book  keeping,  20,  142, 
Book  of  the  Dead, 

127,  130. 
Book-pouches,    146. 

See  also  Pouches. 


Bookcase,   145,   146. 

See  also.  Chests. 
Books,  38, 

Books  of  Hermes,  144. 
Books  of  Thoth,  141. 
Bookshop,   i6. 
Borneo,  82. 
Bounty  on  scalps,  85. 
Boxes,   146,   147,   148, 

149. 
Bracelets,  106. 
Brahma,  27,  29,  30. 
Brain,  65,  68. 
Brain  paths,  65. 
Branding     of     cattle, 

135. 
Building,   17. 
Bundles,  148. 
Buried  books,  128. 
Bushmen,    107. 
Business  documents, 

18,  19. 
Business   records,   15. 
Cain,  42,  43. 
Calendar  skins,   113. 
Calendars,   108. 
Calumet,   162. 
Canute,  99. 
Cardinal's  hat,  94. 
Cartography,  155. 
Cassianus,  45. 
Cataloguing,  149. 
Caves,  143. 
Celestial  tablets,  28. 


[166] 


INDEX 


Cell  complex,   i8. 
Characteristic    part, 

83. 

Cherubim,  43. 

Chests,  74,  75,  I45. 
See  also.  Boxes, 
Bookcase,    etc. 

Child  psychology,  10. 

Child-study,  54. 

Child  teaching,  11. 

Children,  23. 

Children's  games,  23. 

Children's  playthings, 
129. 

China,  93. 

Chroniclers,  68, 

Classification,  primi- 
tive, 149. 

Claw  necklaces,  85. 

Clay  boxes,  chests  or 
jars,  19,  145,  146 
147,  148. 

Clay  tablets,  32,  148, 

Clog  Almanac,  95. 

Coadamite    libraries, 
25. 

Codexes,  19. 

Collections,  17. 

Collections   of   mne- 
monic books,  153. 

Collections  of  sacred 
emblems,  127. 

Collections  of  written 
records,   140. 


Color  symbolism,  162. 

Columbia  University, 
151. 

Comparative    library 
science,  22. 

Comparative    myth- 
ology, 26. 

Comparative  psychol- 
ogy, 26. 

Confucian  books,  69. 

Contracts,  132,  133. 

Copies  of  necklaces, 
106. 

Counting  house,  19, 
92. 

Creator  gods,  27. 

Crete,  84. 

Cries,  10,  60. 

Custom,  22. 

Dances,  73,  74. 

Darius,  93. 

Deaf-mutes,  72. 

Definition  of  the  li- 
brary, 159. 

Delphis,  33. 

Department   records, 

143. 
Determinatives,  iii. 
Development  of  ideas, 

10. 
Dodona,  33. 

Dog,  35. 

Dramatic  representa- 
tions, 162. 


[167] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 


Draped  strings,  148. 

Drum  language,  99. 

Earliest  librarians, 
142. 

Earliest  libraries,  142. 

Economic  records, 
132,  133. 

Eden,  43,  46. 

Education,  3. 

Egypt,  III,  117. 

Egyptian  hieroglyph- 
ics, 115. 

Egyptian  models  of 
tools,  129. 

Egyptian  mysteries, 
74. 

Egyptian  temples,  147, 

Egyptians,  51. 

Elysian  fields,  128. 

Engraving,  155,  162, 

Enoch,  43. 

Eudoxus,  125. 

Eve,  46. 

Evolution,  9,  22. 

Evolution   of   lan- 
guage, 58. 

Face  painting,  105. 

Family   histories, 
primitive,    132. 

Featherwork,  86,  162. 

Fetish,  162. 

Fetish  collections,  88. 

Fetish  objects,  87. 

Fetishes,  89,  132. 


Field    of    library 

science,  3. 
Filipino  head  hunters, 

82. 
Financial  accounts, 

132. 
Finger-print   records, 

IQ2. 

First  fruits,  123,  136. 

Folded  documents,  19, 
147. 

Folklore,  23. 

Foot  prints,  loi. 

Foretelling,  13. 

Fossils,  103,  106. 

Fox,  34. 

Fox's  brush,  85. 

Genetic,  9. 

Germ  of  the  library, 
140. 

Gesture,  58. 

Gesture  language,  35, 
37,  59,  60,  61,  72,  99. 

Gesture  records,  60. 

Gesture  signs,  112. 

Gestures,  10,  34. 

Girdles,   148. 

Golden  tumors,  124. 

Graves,  132. 

Greek  mysteries,  74. 

Greek  temple  treas- 
uries, 120. 

Hairdressing,  162. 

Ham,  42. 


[168] 


INDEX 


Hand  gesture,  59. 
Handwriting,  36. 
Hanno,  125. 
Haoma,  32. 
Happy    hunting 

grounds,  128. 
Head  of  cattle,  83. 
Heap  of  pebbles,  97. 
Heidrun,  30. 
Heraclitus,  125. 
Hermes,  IS7- 
Hesiod,  125. 
Hieroglyphics,  57,  I44- 
Historic  libraries,  50. 
Historical   method  of 

teaching,  10. 
Homer,  70. 
Horns  on  altars,  84. 
Horns  on  men,  84. 
Horses,  painted,  109. 
House  of  wisdom,  28. 
Hunting  trophies,  81, 

82,  83,  84. 
Hymns,  132. 
Identification  mark, 

104. 
Ideograms,  55,  99,  "4. 
Ideographic   records, 

114. 
Iduna,  30,  139. 
Image  collections,  55, 

116. 
Image   writing,    56, 

103,  109. 


Image,  124. 
Imitation,  34. 
Indians,  72. 
Individual  mark,  104. 
Initiation   ceremonies, 

153. 

Invention  of  hand- 
writing, 58. 

Inward  books,  66/  71. 

Inward  handwriting, 
66. 

Inward  record,  72. 

Inward  speech,  66. 

Jackdaw,  34. 

Jars,  32,  146. 

Jewish  oral  tradition, 
70. 

Jewish  temple,  120. 

Jewish  temple  treas- 
uries,   122. 

Juno,  94. 

Keeper  of  records, 
142,  143. 

Keepers   of  quipus, 

153. 
Keepers  of  the  books, 

143. 
Kiowa,  108. 
Knife-hilts,  95. 
Knot  amulets,  130. 
Knot  books,  93. 
Knots,  162. 
Knots  for  records  or 

reminders,   130. 


[169I 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 


Knotted  cord,  91. 
Knotted    measuring 

line,  94. 
Koran,  27,  69. 
Kvaser,  30. 
Labels,  134,  149. 
Labrets,  87,  162. 
"Laid  up",   125,   136. 
Land  deeds,  134. 
Language  of  the  apes, 

34. 

Latest    book    not    al- 
ways, best,  6. 

Lawyer's  green  bag, 
bag,  146. 

Lecturers,  70. 

Leopard's  teeth,  103. 

Leopard's  tooth  neck- 
lace, 86. 

Libraria,  15. 

Librarians,    priests, 

144- 

Libraries  for  paradise, 
129. 

Libraries    for    the 
dead,  116,  117,  127. 

Libraries  of  the  gods, 
25,  2.T,  22,  160. 

Library,  8,    19. 

Library  economy,  155. 

Library  research,  156. 

Library  school  train- 
ing,  I. 

Library   schools,   3, 
151. 


[170] 


Library  science,  4,  11. 
Lightning  calculators, 

98. 
List  of  arrows,  134. 
Lists  of  cattle,  134. 
Literary  works,  19. 
Liturgical  rites,  72. 
Living  library,  105. 
Local   administrative 

records,  143. 
Log  line,  92, 

Magic  spells,  127. 
Magical  charm  collec- 
tions, 116. 
Mail  pouches,  146. 
Manuscripts,  154. 
Marbles,  98. 
Marks,  106,  135. 
Mathematics,  102. 
Mead,  32. 
Meal   "before   God", 

137- 
Medical  works,  149. 
Medicine  bag,  86,  87, 

89,  116,  146. 
Medicine  man,  68,  142. 
Medicine  sack,  89. 
Medicine  temple,  92. 
Medicine  tent,  92,  132. 
Medicine  wigwam, 

143. 
Memory,  62. 
Memory  libraries,  26, 

27,  53,  54,  55,  65. 


INDEX 


Mendelism,  7. 
Message  sticks,  54,  91, 

95,  132,  153,  146,  162. 
Metal,  19. 
Method,  22. 
Methodology,  24- 
Methods  of  research, 

158. 
Methuselah,  46. 
Mexicans,  94. 
Military  records,  143. 
Milk-stones,   loi. 
Minerva,   157. 
Minstrels,  70. 
Mnemonic  collections, 

116. 
Mnemonic  fringes,  93, 

130. 
Mnemonic  libraries, 

53,  54,  91. 
Mnemonic  objects,  90, 

119,  126,  127. 
Mnemonic    records, 

132. 
Mnemonic  writing,  53. 
Models,  121. 
Mongol  libraries,  40. 
Monuments,   22. 
Moses,  43. 
Mourning,  162. 
Moving  pictures,  100. 
Museums,  79. 
Mythologers,  32. 
Myths,  157. 


Natural  image,  103. 
Natural  method,  ii. 
Natural  object  images, 

lOI. 

Natural  relics,  138. 

Natural  stone  forms, 
107. 

Nautical  knot,  94. 

Necklace,  103,   148. 

Nectar,  32. 

New  York  Public  Li- 
brary,  17. 

New  York  Public  Li- 
brary school,  3. 

Nick-stick,  95. 

Nisibis,  44. 

Noah,  26,  42,  43. 

North  American  In- 
dians, 107,  III. 

Notch  books,  91,  95. 

Notch  records,  95. 

Object   abbreviation, 
82. 

Object  collections,  116, 
119. 

Object  libraries,  53, 
55. 

Object  record  collec- 
tion, 88. 

Objects  buried  with 
the  dead,  118. 

Odin,  27,  29,  30,  31. 

Odrorer,  31. 


[171] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 


Old  Testament,  69. 
One  book  library,  17. 
Onopides,  125. 
Oracles,  33. 
Oral  speech,  58. 
Oral  verbal  tradition, 

69. 
Origin  of  libraries, 

133- 
Ornament,   162. 
Ornament  a  personal 

record,  129. 
Orphic  tablets,  128, 

164. 
Ownership  mark,  104. 
Painting,  162. 
Palaeography,  152, 

154.  157- 
Palermo  stone,  63,  134. 
Pantomime,  61,  72. 
Paper,  19. 
Papyrus,  148. 
Papyrus  rolls,  32. 
Paradise,  129. 
Parrot,  34. 
Patriarchal  libraries, 

25. 
Patriarchs,  25. 
Peace,  i37- 
Peas,  98. 
Pebble  records,  91,  97, 

98,  163. 
Pebbles,  147,  148. 
Pentateuch,  69. 


Personal  adornment, 

87,  132. 
Peruvians,  94. 
Petalian  tablets,  128, 

129. 
Petroglyphs,  57,  108. 
Philosophizers,  140. 
Phonetic  records,  52- 

53,  64,  122. 
Phonetic  signs,  112. 
Phonetic  writing,  51, 

115- 

Phonograms,  55,  99. 

Phonograph,  158. 

Phonographic  records, 
66. 

Photograph,  158. 

Pictographs.  99,  162. 

Pictorial  collections, 
116. 

Pictorial  image  rec- 
ord, 115. 

Pictorial  object  librar- 
ies, 76. 

Pictorial  objects,  90, 
103. 

Pictorial  writing,  56, 

Picture  book  librar- 
ies, 53,  54,  100. 

Picture  books,  100. 

Picture  library,  113. 

Picture  writing,  53,  76, 
100,  103,  III,  112, 
114,  115. 


[172] 


INDEX 


Picture  writing  Iby  suc- 
cessive pictures,  113. 

Pictures,  I2i. 

Pintadores,  105. 

Plants,  25,  34,  37. 

Playing  of  children, 
98. 

Political  archives,  121. 

Pottery  marks,  lOi, 
136. 

Pouch,  98,  146,  147. 

Prayer  sticks,  162. 

Prayers,  132. 

Preadamite  libraries, 
25,  39.  40,  160. 

Predynastic  libraries, 

53. 
Prehistoric  libraries, 

50,  53,  161. 
Prehistoric  period,  5°- 
Prehistoric  western 

Europe,  161. 
Prehuman  libraries, 

25. 
Prephonetic  libraries, 

53. 
Priest-king,  136. 
Priest  librarians,  145. 
Priestly  collections, 

116. 
Primitive  art,  14. 
Primitive  libraries,  14, 

116,  159. 
Primitive    libraries, 

contents,  132. 


Primitive  picture  writ- 
ing, 107. 

Primitive  tribes,  161. 

Primitive  writing,  132. 

Printed  books  in  the 
Stone  Age,  105. 

Private  library,  117. 

Private  record  collec- 
tions, 116. 

Prophecy,  12, 

Pseudepigraphic  lit- 
erature of  the 
O.  T.,  160. 

Psychology  of  chil- 
dren, 24. 

Public  documents,  18. 

Public  records,  117. 

Pueblo  Indians,  93. 

Purse,  147. 

Quillwork,  162. 

Quipus,  54,  76,  91,  92, 
94,  128,  T30, 132, 146, 
163. 

Race  history  of  man, 

9. 
Rebus,  100. 
Receptacles,  145. 
Reciters,  70,  130. 
Record,  35,  60. 
Record  by  primitive 

man,  161-162. 
Record  collections,  36, 

138. 
Record  keeping,  35, 

54,  61. 


[173] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 


Record  oibjects,  120. 

Records  of  cattle,  134. 

Reflection  in  water, 
106. 

Registry,   19, 

Religious  collections, 
117. 

Research,  157,  158. 

Robes,  painted,  109. 

Rock  carvings,  loi. 

Rolls,  19,  147. 

Safety  deposit,  an- 
cient, 120. 

Sample  record,  iii. 

Scalp  belt,  85. 

Scalping,  162. 

Scalps,  82. 

Schoolboy's  bag,  146. 

Schools  for  library 
science,  4. 

Schools    in    ancient 
India,  IS3- 

Schools  in  Babylonia, 

IS3. 

School  libraries,  an- 
cient, 121. 

Science,  3. 

Score,  95- 

Scribes,  143. 

Scriptoria,  153. 

Sculpture,  103. 

Seals,  loi. 

Secret  languages,  153. 

Secret  libraries,  144. 


Secret  writing,  144. 
Secular  collections, 

116. 
Secular  recorders, 

149. 
Seshait,  96,  157. 
Seth,  42,  43. 
Shadow,  106. 
Shaman,  119,  143,  149. 
Shelves,  ancient,  148. 
Shepherd  boys,  98. 
Ship's  figurehead,  loi. 
Shrines,  119,  145,  162, 
Sign,  20. 

Sign  language,  162. 
Signals,  162. 
Signposts,  108. 
Silhouette,  107. 
Single  book  library, 

21. 
Single  cell  origins,  9. 
Single  word  book,  21. 
Sippara,  44. 
Skin   calendars,   132. 
Skin  marks,  106,  107. 
Solon,  45,  125. 
Soma,  30,  32. 
Sound  language,   59. 
Sound  records,  61. 
Spoils,  78. 
Stamps,  105. 
Stenography,  81. 
Stone,  19. 
Storeroom,  127. 


[174] 


INDEX 


Story  teller,  67. 
Stringing  together  of 

records,  148,  149. 
Study   of  beginnings, 

5. 

Sumerian,  52, 

Sumerian  hieroglyph- 
ics, lis. 

Sumerian  records,  134. 

Sumerians,  51. 

Sunburn,  107. 

Symbol  records,  121. 

Symbolic  enlWems, 
129. 

Symbolic  processions, 

73- 
Tablets,  19,  105,  123. 
Tablets  "laid  up",  121. 
Tablets  of  destiny,  28. 
Tablets  of  wisdom,  28. 
Tabu,  120,  139,  140. 
Tallies,  91,  95,  96. 
Talmud,   27. 
Tattooing,  104,  105, 

162. 
Temple  deposits,  119. 
Temple  libraries,  142, 

144,  149- 
Temple  schools,  153. 
Temple  treasuries, 

120. 
Temples,  142. 
Thank  offerings,   122. 
Thoth,  27,  29,  157. 


Tithe-tax,  124. 
Totem  poles,  162. 
Totems,   104,    132. 
Traddng  of  criminals, 

102. 
Tracks  in  day,  107. 
Trade-mark,   136. 
Trailing,  102, 
Treasuries,  78,  122, 

146. 
Tribal  feasts,  138. 
Tribal  libraries,  144. 
Tribal  mark,  104. 
Tribal  meal,  137. 
Tribal  record  collec- 
tions, 116. 
Tribal  recorders,  130. 
Tribal  records,  68. 
Tribal  story  teller, 

119. 
Trophy  collections,  86. 
Trophy  necklaces,  86, 

98,  106. 
Trophy  objects,  148. 
Trophy  records,  103, 

133,  136. 
Twig  bundles,  98. 
Twig  records,  96,  97, 

148. 
Ulysses,  94. 
Universe,  8. 
University   of   librar- 

ianship,  155. 
Ushabtiu,  130. 


[175] 


THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  LIBRARIES 


Vedas,  27,  29,  30,  69. 
Vellum,  19. 
Vishnu,  45. 
Votive  collections,  121, 

124,  132. 
Votive  libraries,  125. 
Votive  offerings,  116, 

118,    123,    127,    135, 

163. 
Wampiun,  54,  96,  162. 
Wampum  belts,  91, 

113. 
War  paint,  104,  105. 
War  trophies,  81,  84, 

123. 


Whole  object  records, 

17,  82. 
Wigwams,  132. 
Wood,  19. 
Wood  cases,  147. 
Wooden  chests,  145. 
Wooden  models,  103. 
Word,  20. 
Writing,  60. 
Writing  ape,  36. 
Written    tablets,    70. 
Xenocrates,  125, 
Zeus   as   god   of   the 

storeroom,  126,  127. 
Zodiac,  28. 


[176] 


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